Solutionary was built as a managed security services provider from the ground up.

by Jeff Goldman [February 5, 2009]

The managed security services provider Solutionary, founded back in 2000, boasts one key difference from many of its competitors. "We've been an MSSP from the very beginning," notes company channel sales manager Jarrett Miller. "We're not a hardware vendor that added on services to be an MSSP—that's what we were built as from the ground up."

Miller says ActiveGuard, Solutionary's patented security monitoring and information management platform, is a key differentiator for the company. "It's very scalable," he says. "We've been partnered with Siemens for years, and Siemens recently purchased the ability to use ActiveGuard in Europe to provide services to thousands and thousands of customers, so the ability for ActiveGuard to scale is key."

Solutionary 9420 Underwood Avenue 3rd Floor Omaha, NE 68114 Voice: (866) 333-2133 Fax: (402) 361-3100 E-mail: info@solutionary.com

The platform is also extremely flexible, allowing the company to work with a wide variety of devices. "We're able to add vendors to our approved vendor list relatively easily," Miller says . "So as a result, we have the highest device type count of any MSSP. We have over 90 different vendors approved, and that's one of our big differentiating factors."

Solutionary's partnership options are straightforward: all of the company's services, Miller says, can be offered by service providers to their own customers as either co-branded or white labeled solutions. "And we can have a service provider in market with an offering very, very quickly," he says. "We're very easy to partner with—we've been doing it for years."

A dedicated account manager
Still, Miller says the company's greatest differentiator lies in its culture, not its technology. "Solutionary is the only MSSP in the world that employs an account manager—a customer advocate that lives in the SOC and is available for a customer 24/7 on a pager or by cell phone, or will be called by the SOC and woken up at the three in the morning," he says.

The account manager serves as a single point of contact for the customer—and, Miller says, "has an intimate knowledge of that customer's network, the decisions that were made, the security posture the customer's trying to maintain, and really from start to finish every security detail that they can hold in their head about that customer. As a result, we have very, very effective communication with the customer."

While it's not cheap for Solutionary to maintain that level of service, Miller says it's worth it. "It's an expense that we bear because in the long run we see that this benefits our customers, and it keeps our customer retention rate very, very high," he says. "We just don't tend to lose customers, and I think a lot of it has to do with the account manager."

Although the company offers a full user portal, Miller says Solutionary encourages customers to take advantage of the account manager as much as possible. "The portal the customer sees is the exact same portal that the SOC uses to do its analysis, but we truly want the customer to interface with us, and come to us not only as a service provider but as their trusted advisor on security," he says.

A range of service options
While Solutionary's main offering is the full-service ActiveGuard Enterprise, the company recently added the more affordable ActiveGuard HPA (High Priority Alerting) option. "It allows us to just contact customers about major events, so it's much more cost-effective. It allows them to perhaps provide Enterprise at their core, and then out on the perimeter, where up-to-the-second updating's not essential, we can provide High Priority Alerts and just watch for the things that are most relevant," Miller says.

The company also offers ActiveGuard SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), a straightforward SIEM-as-a-service offering. "It allows the customer to leverage our ActiveGuard just as they would leverage a SIEM," Miller says. "The ActiveGuard updates to a portal, and the customer interacts with that portal just as they would interact with a Cisco MARS box or a Juniper STRM or any number of SIEM appliances."

Another option, ActiveGuard UTM, is targeted at remote or branch offices. "It allows the customer to receive a UTM appliance with all the features. It comes with everything: hardware, licensing, advance replacement, monitoring of that device, management of that device; and that starts at $500 a month per location," Miller says.

All other services are priced per device. While the company's pricing is competitive, Miller says, the focus is on quality of service before anything else. "We generally don't struggle a whole lot with pricing. Obviously, this is a very price-competitive market, and we have very strong competitors that we take extremely seriously, but at the end of the day, we're a Tier 1 service provider," he says.

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Related articles:
	[Dec. 24, 2001]	White Paper: Reducing Network Security Risk
	[Sept. 25, 2001]	Physical Security Augments Logical Security
	[July 11, 2001]	ISP-Planet Survey: MSSPs

Resources:
	Intrusion Detection Systems Directory
	Intrusion Detection Systems Directory: Quick Reference Chart