In the fight against the bad guys of cyberspace, eSentire added another weapon to its belt today by acquiring Versive, a Seattle-based cybersecurity company.
Headquartered in Ontario, eSentire is a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider that hunts, investigates and responds to threats in real time. By acquiring Versive, a company that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize activities that can show the presence of hackers inside a system, eSentire is more poised than ever to help protect its clients’ assets.
“Traditional managed security approaches and tools can’t rapidly scale to cope with the challenges of today’s business environments,” said eSentire CEO Kerry Bailey. “Merging expert data scientists, engineers and security teams and integrating the power of AI into eSentire services will result in the most advanced MDR platform, and the scalability, automation and speed that the modern organization demands without sacrificing quality.”
The next generation MDR requires an integrated approach that applies humans and technology to what each is best at, Bailey explained. eSentire will combine Versive’s powerful AI system with its existing MDR platform to provide customers with visibility across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments, while automating their threat detection and accelerating response times.
Traditional managed security approaches and tools can’t rapidly scale to cope with the challenges of today’s business environments.”
eSentire also announced the senior leadership appointments of former Versive executives Dustin Rigg Hillard as chief technology officer, Ashley Fidler as vice president of product, and Matthew Vanderzee as vice president of engineering. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2012, Versive’s technology has made a name for itself in the cybersecurity space by identifying certain behaviors and activities that intruders cannot avoid as they infiltrate systems and collect and steal data. Versive’s AI-powered algorithms also learn from each event, improving defenses for companies over time.
According to Versive, the company employs 55 people in Seattle, who will be retained in this transaction. It is too early to tell how many additional hires will be made, and in which roles, but the combined companies’ revenue growth targets will require increasing their talent base.
“Rapidly evolving IT environments require a new approach to security,” said Dustin Rigg Hillard, now CTO of eSentire. “Automating and scaling security expertise with machine learning is the clear path to protecting organizations facing machine scale security threats. This is the perfect partnership to drive the next evolution of the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category that eSentire created, further integrating human security expertise and machine scale automation to secure customer networks.”
