William McCormick
Daniel Wilbricht, general manager of Public Sector business with Devo, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz about joining the company back in August, his strategic goals as well as how recent partnerships are driving innovation and new capabilities in the federal landscape during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
“I’m quite fond of saying work hard and you’ll be rewarded. Our culture at Devo is very strong where it comes to supporting every person in every part of their life. I think that’s what brings us all together to work as a team. Everyone on the Public Sector team at Devo has the common mission to protect our government and our citizens within every city, town and place that we live in from a cybersecurity perspective.”
You can read the full interview with Daniel Wilbricht below:
ExecutiveBiz: Congrats on joining Devo back in August! What were the attributes of its mission that attracted you to the role? What do you hope to accomplish with the company?
Daniel Wilbricht: “It’ll be a year in August that I’ve been with Devo. I can name several noted accomplishments over my first year here. I knew coming into the company that we had the beginnings of a federal presence kicked off by a very strong customer in the U.S. Air Force. That was great for us to get started, but Devo didn’t really have a comprehensive plan on how to continue to drive to the next level.
The reason I came to Devo was the opportunity to build out that plan and because of Devo’s people and its senior leadership were so incredibly in touch with how to get that done. We’re all committed to drive this company to ensure our customers were successful and expand our public sector footprint, which includes federal, state and local government and education.
Since I joined, I’ve led the creation of a channel, supported marketing growth, and pushed Devo on track for FedRAMP. I have also hired a team of people who have all been in this business for a while and bring additional Public Sector experience.
It’s all about ramping up and preparing to deliver for our customers and we’re starting to see the results. Devo has been winning deals head to head against our competition because we’re 10 times faster, we can process more than ten times the amount of data, at half the cost.
We understand that there is good technology out there and Devo does not solve every Cybersecurity issue but we integrate with other best of breed technologies to create the best solutions for our prospects, customers, and partners. It’s all about solving the mission and developing a partnership to work together. Devo has allowed me to take what the company and its people have built and help protect our nation.
Before I came aboard in August, Devo was a decent sized company with a very good reputation and valuation. We raised a significant round of funding in October. As a result, our evaluation surged and we became a unicorn. We’ve also received another investment from a partner who wanted to bring in more than the first round six months before.
In addition, Devo has added some very large name brand customers in the commercial space. We have built out our APAC team, EMEA team and continued to invest in our public sector team that covers North America, which includes clients from our local government, several U.S. universities and across Canada.
North America is really our biggest footprint, but we’re growing in every vertical right now. My goal for the public sector side of our business is to grow at 200 percent year over year. We have very ambitious goals for Devo, but I’m confident we’re going to reach that mark as my team and our company continues to grow.”
ExecutiveBiz: What can you tell us about Devo’s recent growth initiatives and how you’re driving value for your customers through contract awards, acquisitions and other aspects across the federal sector?
Daniel Wilbricht: “We weren’t looking for the recent round of funding and it was fantastic to receive in this market. An additional benefit of this new round of funding is continued support and more growth of our public sector business as well as to help us with the cost of achieving FedRAMP and it has enabled us to consider other certifications to reach our DoD and Intelligence Community prospects.
Another growth area for Devo was our acquisition of Kognos back in April. Kognos is an autonomous threat hunting platform leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. They have this very interesting application that now can sit on top of ours to analyze data as it’s coming in and being ingested in near real time.
This application also helps the analyst make decisions along the way and these decision trees are built into the product. The intent is to improve the efficiency and finding the intruder as quickly as possible.
I’ve learned in the last decade in cybersecurity that bad actors and other threats are going to find their ways into your systems. The question is how fast can you find them and stop them before they do a ton of damage.”
ExecutiveBiz: How have recent partnerships been able to assist Devo to expand its position in the federal marketplace, drive innovation and new capabilities and ultimately help complete your company’s mission?
Daniel Wilbricht: “From a partnership perspective, one of the key aspects that has grown considerably has been the channel itself from a DLT, Vertosoft and then our value-added resellers like ThunderCat, Optiv or Iron Bow and many others that Devo has set up this year. That’s a big reason for our success.
The other piece is technology partners like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Zscaler and others that are running these environments where Devo works to collect their data. For instance, Recorded Future and Corelight are both companies that we partner with to help tell a better story when you’re talking about Zero Trust Architecture and implementation.
To provide a comprehensive solution your architecture needs to include a SentinelOne or CrowdStrike type of product as well as a SIEM (security information and event management) solution (like Devo) to ensure that you’re actually following your zero-trust model.
At Devo, we don’t claim to do everything, but working with our partners and going to market with them in the public sector will be key for us because we want to ensure the completeness of the solution for our customers so we can protect our nation and its people..
We go to market with our larger partners like AWS and have them bring us in as a part of the solution with the integrators to make better relationships with the significant names in the federal landscape, including Accenture Federal Services, Booz Allen, Leidos, SAIC and others.
That’s all part of our strategy at Devo to let them know what we do and provide an alternative option instead of everyone continuing to bid on the same thing. We have an opportunity to be a true game changer because of our product, our people and our commitment to our customers.
Devo is the first SIEM that was built specifically for the cloud from the ground up and people are starting to notice our work more and we’re being compared to big names because of our performance and significantly lower TCO.”
