‘Both organizations are specialists in their fields. Redstor was a specialist backup provider, and TitanHQ was a specialist email security company. What MSPs need to keep their customers secure in today’s day and age is a data protection stack and a cybersecurity stack,’ says CyberSentriq CEO James Griffin.
The IT industry has seen its share of attempts to bring data protection and cybersecurity together as part of a unified offering, or at least under the same roof. Security provider Symantec tried with its 2005 acquisition of Veritas, but 10 years later gave up and sold Veritas.
Other attempts have been more successful, at least for now. Companies like Cohesity, Rubrik, and Commvault came from the data protection side and have added sophisticated cybersecurity capabilities, particularly around ransomware protection, to keep the data they store safe.
A newcomer, CyberSentriq, is now trying to bring the two technologies together, but with a twist: It is focused exclusively on MSPs.
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CyberSentriq was born this month in the U.K. when Bregal Milestone, the private equity company that owns Reading, U.K.-based data protection technology developer Redstor, acquired TitanHQ, the Galway, Ireland-based cybersecurity vendor.
CyberSentriq CEO James Griffin (pictured above) told CRN that the combined company brings together the specializations of both Redstor and TitanHQ into a single organization dedicated to providing a single stack to MSPs worldwide.
“What MSPs need to keep their customers secure in today’s day and age is a data protection stack and a cybersecurity stack,” Griffin said. “In the market, MSPs are underserved not in terms of choice, but they either have to go to a massive platform vendor for that level of breadth or work with multiple best-of-breed vendors to create their own stack. We saw a really clear space to do something that delivers the breadth but builds on our strengths as best-of-breed vendors to give a really great service and product quality experience.”
CyberSentriq, which is a profitable company, has a combined customer base of 300 MSPs, most of whom are in North America, Griffin said. However, he acknowledged that it still has work to do.
“We will be bringing the product portfolios together, starting almost immediately,” he said. “I think it’s really important that the service experience is integrated. What we can tell our existing customers is they will continue as is, and they will continue to get a great experience, but absolutely, the brand will now come to life.”
There’s a lot going on at CyberSentriq. To learn more, read the full conversation between Griffin and CRN, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
How do you define CyberSentriq?
CyberSentriq is an MSP-focused platform providing cybersecurity and data protection tools. That includes AI-powered threat protection, email security, email archiving, cloud-based backup, and email and web security all in one MSP platform.
The company as of today is based all over the world. Redstor, one of the founding companies, has a base in Reading and in Birmingham [in the U.K.]. But CyberSentriq is based in Galway, Ireland; Connecticut; Tampa, Fla.; Shelton, Conn.; Cape Town, South Africa; Lisbon, Portugal; and Birmingham and Reading in the U.K.
We’ve got a sales organization in Florida and Connecticut. We’ve got some remote employees dotted around. Nobody’s further west than the Chicago area, but we have some remote people in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. There’s proper, meaningful boots on the ground in the U.S.
Talk about the founding of CyberSentriq.
We’ve brought two companies together, Redstor and TitanHQ. Redstor is a 25-year-old MSP-focused backup provider, and TitanHQ is a 20-year-old email security provider. Now both are owned by Bregal Milestone. We brought them together in a merger to create CyberSentriq as a brand-new company.
Why merge the two companies? What synergy do you get from bringing them together rather than having them go about business individually?
Both organizations are specialists in their fields. Redstor was a specialist backup provider, and TitanHQ was a specialist email security company. What MSPs need to keep their customers secure in today’s day and age is a data protection stack and a cybersecurity stack. In the market, MSPs are underserved not in terms of choice, but they either have to go to a massive platform vendor for that level of breadth or work with multiple best-of-breed vendors to create their own stack. We saw a really clear space to do something that delivers the breadth but builds on our strengths as best-of-breed vendors to give a really great service and product quality experience. And that’s quite rare. It’s normally a large company acquiring a small company. These are two equally-sized specialists coming together. And what’s great is our products are completely complementary. We now have 3,000 MSPs. There was very little overlap [between Redstor and TitanHQ]. So this is accretive to both organizations in terms of net-new business.
We decided to launch the new CyberSentriq brand because we wanted something that would be known to play in the combined space of cyber and data protection.
Why do you say there’s little overlap between the two companies given that MSPs need both data protection and cybersecurity?
The MSP market is pretty large. Between both companies, we had 3,000 MSPs out of several hundred thousand total. There was very minimal overlap. And I do think that’s down to the fact that there’s a lot of best-of-breed vendors in the space, and fewer vendors that offer the full breadth of services. That’s why we think this is pretty unique, because it’s not a huge platform player has already got all the customers just acquiring a small company and frankly ruining it just for the IP (intellectual property). We are two companies that are really good at what we do, and we’re putting them together and creating something bigger and more forceful.
Many if not most MSPs work with some type of platform provider like Kaseya, ConnectWise, or NinjaOne. Does CyberSentriq work through those platforms to reach MSPs?
There’s a couple of relationships those platform vendors have in the MSP ecosystem. There’s the technology offerings, and there’s the tools that MSPs need to operate, for example, PSA (professional services automation). What’s really important that is that we want to integrate and work in the way that MSPs need to work, for example, connecting with things like ConnectWise for integration into PSA. But in terms of reaching MSPs, those aren’t really the target channels to market for our organization. We go to market directly to MSPs. We go to market through digital marketplaces such as Pax8. We go to market through distributors, and we consider the platform vendors, the large-scale platform vendors, as competitive to us because they have their product catalog. But we believe we’re going to do a much better job with our breadth of offerings but with that real high-quality service experience.
Well, how do you compete in the MSP space against platform vendors who not only provide a wider range of capabilities like PSA and RMM and so on, but who typically also now have their own data protection and cybersecurity offerings or work with multiple providers of those technologies?
So obviously this is a real deliberate move we’ve put in play here to bring these companies together because we’ve seen that gap by talking to MSPs. And what I love about the MSP community, particularly in the U.S., which is a very advocacy-based market, is MSPs are prepared to tell you what they love about the vendors, and what they don’t. They’re really clear about that. And what they’ve told us is there are vendors out there that offer lots of choice, but they’ve done it typically by using string to pull together these acquisitions. So although they offer MSPs choice, and they may have a great commercial offer, it introduces friction, or the service experience isn’t that great. Their other choice is to work with some reputable, fantastic vendors but build their stack together. They have to knit it together themselves, all the best-of-breed vendors. And you know, MSPs are very clear that they will judge us, not by the press release or what CRN writes or what they read on our website. MSPs are going to judge us by, will they continue to buy from the organization? Will they come to us from those other vendors? Will they evangelize us? They will absolutely only judge us on whether we deliver really high-quality service, which we’re known for, which we can do across a broader range of products, and whether we continue to do a really great job serving them when things go wrong, and whether when they pick up the phone they get a real first-class experience, and whether we do that at a price point they can’t ignore and that makes sense. That’s what they’ve asked for. That’s what they need to hold us to account for, to deliver. And I believe if we do that, we will be competitive. How you compete in the MSP market is you let the MSPs do the evangelism. And that evangelism comes from being the vendor that they trust.
Is CyberSentriq a profitable organization?
Yes. We haven’t released numbers, and both organizations are going through an audit, but Bregal Milestone was the backer of Redstor, and TitanHQ was private equity-backed by [London-based] Livingbridge. Bregal Milestone bought the two organizations together, and they are one of Europe’s leading growth investors.
How big is your North American market compared to your European market?
We’re not releasing the revenue splits, but in terms of MSP numbers, it’s over half of the combined entity. Both organizations, although headquartered in Europe, have managed to build fairly substantial businesses already in the U.S.
So you’re bringing together a cybersecurity company and a data protection company. What kind of synergies do you get? Will there be an integration between the offerings, or will they be pretty much offered as standalone offerings?
We will be bringing the product portfolios together, starting almost immediately. I think it’s really important that the service experience is integrated. What we can tell our existing customers is they will continue as is, and they will continue to get a great experience, but absolutely, the brand will now come to life. The products will begin to be rebranded. They will come together in bundles and packages that will be announced very shortly, and it will feel like one continuous suite of tools from a world class platform.
Will the CyberSentriq and TitanHQ brands continue, or will everything be branded CyberSentriq?
So today, they’ll continue as sub-brands of CyberSentriq, and over time, they will merge into the master brand.
Anything else you think we need to know about CyberSentriq?
No. The MSPs will be the ultimate judge of this. And that’s what I’m really focused on. There’s lots of people that give really great press releases about their acquisitions, their announcements, their mergers, and they’ve misstepped. [We want to] create a vendor that redefines the standards that MSPs can expect from the organization they partner with. That’s our mission here at CyberSentriq. We’re obsessed with it, and we want to let MSPs experience the difference and be the ones that evangelize our business.
