SALT LAKE CITY – March 28, 2018 – Venafi®, the leading provider of machine identity protection, today announced strong business growth and accelerated sales momentum in 2017.
“Businesses spend billions of dollars protecting usernames and passwords that humans use to identify and authenticate themselves, but they spend very little protecting machine identities,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. “Bad guys are stealing both human and machine identities at an alarming rate. And while they need to be protected, the widespread adoption of cloud, IoT, DevOps, AI and robots is causing the number of weakly defended machine identities to grow exponentially. Because cybercriminals understand this, they routinely target them.”
Over the past year, Venafi has seen significant growth and success across every part of its business, including:
- Subscription revenue grew over 40 percent, with customer renewal rates above 97 percent.
- Doubled the already sizable number of customers who transact business with Venafi at amounts greater than $1 million per year.
- Venafi was awarded three new patents, extending the company’s strong intellectual property portfolio to 21 patents, with nine additional patents pending
- The Venafi Trust Protection Platform received Common Criteria Certification, an international standard for hardware and software devices used by the federal government and many other national security programs.
- Launched the Venafi Technology Network, a program that connects leading Certificate Authorities, security technologies, DevOps platforms and cloud services with real-time machine identity intelligence. In 2017, the program added many new integrations, including Amazon, CyberArk, Docker, Gemalto, Hashicorp, Microsoft Azure and Saltstack.
In March, Venafi expanded the executive leadership team by adding Aaron Aubrecht as the vice president of products. With more than 20 years’ experience in strategy and building enterprise software products, Aubrecht brings a wealth of knowledge to Venafi and will help the company capitalize on its market momentum. He has held leadership positions at McKinsey & Company, Covisint, Dell EMC, Symantec, Morgan Stanley and Accenture. He holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from North Carolina State, a Master of Business Administration for University of Chicago and is a retired United States Airforce Captain.
The Venafi platform protects the cryptographic keys and digital certificates that serve as machine identities; they are used to secure machine-to-machine communication. Just as usernames and passwords identify and authenticate humans, machine identities create trusted relationships between machines and control the flow of information between machines. Unfortunately, machine identities are one of the most poorly understood and under-defended parts of enterprise networks. Cybercriminals use attack strategies that routinely exploit unprotected, weak and vulnerable machine identities.
“Venafi was the first to identify this rapidly growing cybersecurity problem and created technology that protects machine identities. The phenomenal growth of our business demonstrates just how crucial machine identity protection is to our customers,” Hudson concluded.