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On March 19, 2014, Verdasys announced a $12 million investment round and named Kenneth Levine CEO, replacing Jim Ricotta. The company said it would use the financing to expand product development and strengthen its partner channel around Digital Guardian, its enterprise data loss prevention platform. These were plans announced in 2014—not confirmation of what followed or of the company’s current status.
Who became Verdasys CEO?
Kenneth Levine took over from Jim Ricotta. At the time of his appointment, Levine was a McAfee security management executive and had previously served as CEO and chairman of NitroSecurity. CRN also identified him as a co-founding partner of Brookline Venture Partners. Earlier, he had been part of the startup team at Cabletron Systems and served as its executive vice president of sales for 15 years; CRN reported that Cabletron reached nearly $2 billion in revenue, without specifying the period or measurement method.
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The appointment and financing were announced together on March 19, 2014. The $12 million round was led by existing investors GE Pension Trust and Fairhaven Capital, with a new individual investment from Brookline Venture Partners, according to CRN’s announcement report and the company-issued release.
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Levine told CRN that Verdasys planned to build a more robust partner program, add channel-support staff, and double the engineering team. The company’s release described broader goals: expanding into new markets and use cases, developing the product, and growing partnerships and channels. Those statements describe intended uses, not verified results.
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For a business reader, the strategic link was direct: more engineering capacity could support product expansion, while more channel support could help recruit and serve partners selling or delivering Digital Guardian. The announcement did not provide a breakdown of how much of the $12 million would go to each area.
What Digital Guardian did—and how partners fit
Digital Guardian was an agent-based enterprise DLP platform designed to protect sensitive data. CRN described it as using behavior-based data to address threats from insiders and external attackers, with delivery either on-premises or as a managed service. Verdasys reported nearly two million endpoint agents deployed globally in its March 2014 release; that is the company’s figure for that time, not an independently established current count.
The channel plan was not limited to a simple reseller model. The partners Levine described could act as resellers, consultants, systems integrators, or managed-service providers. In his words, “Our goal would be to find the right amount of channel partners in the right space so that we can support each other in growing the business, satisfying the customer and making money.” He also characterized partners as trusted advisers able to combine products around a customer’s security posture, data-protection strategy, and IT environment in an August 2014 follow-up.
Named integrations and managed-service relationships
CRN’s March 2014 report described relationships involving FireEye, Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, and IBM, and a Fidelis OEM relationship for managed DLP. The August follow-up named additional integrations and support, including FireEye, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, HP-ArcSight, Splunk, and Citrix ShareFile. These are relationships and integrations reported in 2014; the reports do not establish whether they remain supported today.
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How the strategy broadened later in 2014
In August, CRN reported that the company had rebranded as Digital Guardian and planned to add channel resources in the Americas, India, and Asia. Levine also described ambitions to move beyond DLP into malware and advanced-threat detection, using data collected by the endpoint agent for additional cyber-security use cases. That was a stated product direction, not evidence that every planned capability had shipped.
The contemporary market context was also time-bound. CRN cited Gartner’s estimate of a $680 million–$710 million DLP market in 2013 and its projection of 22%–25% growth to about $830 million by the end of 2014. Those figures were historical estimates and a forecast reported in 2014, not present-day market sizing. CRN also reported that Verdasys had 200 customers, naming DuPont, Siemens, the U.S. Department of Justice, GE, Cigna, Honda, and Ferrari as examples.
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- Author: Bungay Stanier, Michael.
- Publisher: Page Two
- Pages: 244
- Publication Date: 2016-02-29
- Edition: 1
What the announcement does—and does not—establish
The March announcement documents a leadership change, financing, and an intended investment in engineering and channel growth. The August report shows how the company later described its brand, partner footprint, integrations, and product ambitions. Neither source verifies Verdasys’s present-day operating status, Digital Guardian’s current ownership or availability, current integration support, or an active partner program.
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