to its employees, Hindawi said, without the pressures associated with holding an IPO in the current state of pandemic-driven uncertainty. Cybersecurity startup Tanium, valued at over $9 billion, exercised a clause that allowed it to buy its own shares from former employees whether they wanted to sell or not
"Those partnerships have a lot of legs," Hindaw said, adding that 100 employees at his 1,700-employee company now work exclusively on those partnerships – and that the number will likely climb to 300 within the next several months. for companies in regulated industries that must be able to demonstrate compliance with privacy and security regulations. Tanium and IBM agree that this is a major hurdle to the widespread adoption of cloud computing among large enterprises.
"We're a platform that does a lot of those things in one place," Hindawi said. "We're competing against the idea that we should have fifty different tools. You don't actually want to have fifty tools today. That's unsustainable... Our industry loves to sell our customers, you need five more of these every year, another five next year. What our customers are realizing is they just can't.
"I get a lot of customers coming to us because their friend who does the same thing in some other company heard from the person that this is actually working for them," Hindawi said. "It's shifted to a lot more to reference selling rather than field marketing and field sales. It's really interesting to think about if this continues for a while, how we can reinforce that.""I don't know if it's helped or hurt our business," Hindawi said.