Optiv

Well, it already had an office

there, Optiv.

So it just moved some of it.

It's kind of like Palantir, which had how many people really working downtown? I think maybe it was three when you really looked at it.

Because it sounds like a really great idea.

I'm just going to get SHI and Optiv and GuidePoint, and I'm going to convince them to go sell my stuff.

And then they can go sell it, and I don't have to hire the team.

That's the volume.

But you do need channel if you're going to be in cyber because you have to sell an enterprise and enterprise likes to buy through channel.

I ended up kind of doing this ass backwards sort of reverse channel program where we would go find the end user, you know, get their buy in to get the product and then ask them what channel they wanted to buy through.

And then they were like, whoever, GuidePoint or Optiv or what have you.

And then I would go to, at first I just went to go to Optiv and they're huge too.

Work from home.

Remember the story yesterday about Optiv? How they're just, you know, because people didn't want to come back to work.

So they were just like, well, okay, we're out of here anyway.

We're going to go to where our parent company was already located, suburb of Kansas City.

Look at the tallest tower that Denver's built in probably over 30 years.

When that tower opened, the first name at the top belonged to a Denver company, Optiv.

Homegrown cybersecurity.

That grew out of an older Denver firm called Acuvant.

Last week, Optiv just quietly packed up, moved their headquarters to Leawood, Kansas.

And the Denver workers who are staying behind, they went home to their kitchen tables.

They're going to work from home.

Now, the reason Optive left is not the reason I think most people are going to reach for.

Oh, okay.

Basically is now Optiv.

I went from Fishnet to WebSense, which is now Forcepoint.

Okay.

And then made my transition

into the dark side of the force as a pre-sales SE with Acuvant, if people remember them before they became Optiv, them and Fishnet gathered up.

So worked on that side, then did vendor stuff.

Sam and I had a brief stint, I think, like about five minutes at HP together.

And then made my transition

into the dark side of the force as a pre-sales SE with Acuvant, if people remember them before they became Optiv, them and Fishnet gathered up.

So worked on that side, then did vendor stuff.

Sam and I had a brief stint, I think, like about five minutes at HP together.

I'm Mike Schema.

Joining me today is John Hurley, Chief Revenue Officer at Optiv Security.

Thanks for being here.

I look forward to being here, thank you.

What are they still struggling with? Is it everything is AI, or are there a couple things besides AI that they struggle with?

Well, I would tell you, I still think today our audience is the chief information security officer at most companies that we do business with.

And the old challenges are still the new challenges, right? And so I think the unique part about Optiv is that we've been doing this for a while.

And our, you know, advise, deploy, and operate model is unique in the environment because many of our partners and competitors out there do one thing, and they try to do one thing well, except for pulling it together.