 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great guest here, Brian Bouchard is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Alakranette. Brian, great to see you. Remoting in all the way from Puerto Rico to Palo Alto. That's right. Great to see you. First of all, thanks, John, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, great, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. First of all, before we get into what you guys do and how this all ties into Think, what do you guys do at Alakranette? What's, why the name, A is good. You're at the top of the list and alphabetically, but tell us the secret behind the name and what you guys do. So first of all, Alakranette is based on the root word Alacrity, which means a prompt and willing a prompt, a joyous promptitude, excuse me, to achieve a common goal. So we ultimately are a network of individuals with the traits of Alacrity, so Alakranette. So that's our name. Great, so what's your relationship with IBM and how you guys have been able to leverage the partnership program in the marketplace? Take us through the relationship. So, well, first of all, Alakranette is a platinum IBM business partner and was awarded recently the 2020 IBM North American Partner of the Year Award. And we were selected amongst 1,600 other business partners across North America. We've been actually a consulting, an IT consulting company for almost 20 years now. And we were founded in 2002 in Palo Alto. And we have focused specifically on cybersecurity since 2013. And then as far as, go ahead. What are some of the things you guys are working on? Because obviously, you know, the business is hot right now. Everyone's kind of looking at COVID saying, we're going to double down on the most critical projects and no time for leisurely activities when it comes to IT and cloud-scale projects. You know, mission-critical stuff's happening. What are you guys working on? So we're focused on cybersecurity. Our security services really complement IBM's suite of security solutions and cover the full spectrum from our research and penetration testing, which helps identify vulnerabilities before a breach occurs. And we also have managed security services, which helps prevent, detect, and remediate attacks in real time. And then finally, we also have a security staffing division and a software resale division, which kind of rounds out the full amount of offerings that we have to provide protection for our clients. What are some of the biggest challenges you guys have as a business and how's IBM helping you address those? Well, as you know, John, we all know that it's the importance of cybersecurity in today's world, right? So it's increasing in both demand and importance. And it's not expected to weigh in any time soon. Cyber attacks are on the rise and there's no expected end in sight to this. And in fact, just this week, on 60 Minutes, the J. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he noted that cyber attacks were the number one threat to the stability of the U.S. economy. Also this week, a public school in Buffalo, New York was hacked with ransomware and the school district is just contemplating of paying the ransom to the hackers. So there's literally thousands of these attacks happening every day, whether it's in a local school district or a state government or an enterprise, even if you don't hear about them, they're happening. And then adding to the complexity that the cyber attackers pose is the complexity of the actual cybersecurity tools themselves. There isn't a single solution provider or a single technology that can ensure a company's security. Our customers need to work with many different companies and disconnected tools and processes to build an individual strategy that can adequately protect their organizations. You know, I love this conversation. Whenever I talk to practitioners on cybersecurity, you know, first of all, they're super smart. They're usually cyber punks and they all have some kind of eclectic backgrounds. But more importantly is that there's different approaches in terms of what you hear. Do you add more firefighters, so to speak, to put out the fires and solve the problems? Or do you spend your time preventing the fires from happening in the first place? You know, and, you know, the buildings are burning down. Don't make fire, fire, don't make wood and make fire resistance, you know, more of a priority. So there's less fires, not, I mean, firefighters. So it's that balance. You throw more firefighters at the problem or do you make the supply or the material, the business fireproof? What's your take on that? Well, it kind of works both ways. I mean, we've seen customers want to, they really want choice. They want to, in some cases, they want to be the firefighter and in some cases, they want the firefighter to come in and solve their problems. So the common problem set that we're seeing with our customers encounter is that they struggle one with too many disparate tools. And then they also have too much data being collected by all these disparate tools. And then they have a lack of talent in their environment to manage their environment. So what we've done at LACRONET is we've taken our cybersecurity practice and we've really specifically tailored our offerings to address these core challenges. So first, to address the too many disparate tools problem, we've been recommending that our clients look at security platforms like the IBM CloudPak for security. The IBM CloudPak for security is built on a security platform that allows interoperability across various security tools using open standards. So our customers have been responding extremely positively to this approach and look at it as a way to future-proof their investments and begin taking advantage of interoperability and tools integration. Talk about where you see your business going with this because there's not a shortage of need, demand. How are you guys flexing with the market? What's the strategy? Are you going to use technology enablement? Are you going to be more human-driven? Brian, how do you see your business unfolding? Well, actually really good. We're doing very well. I mean, obviously we've made the top business partner for IBM in 2020. We have significant growth and a lot of interest. I think we really attacked the market with a good strategy, which was to help defragment the market, if you will. There's a lot of point solutions and a lot of point vendors that very, they specialize in one piece of the whole problem. And what we've decided to do is find the highest party list. So every CISO and CIO has a tick list. So they'll have that, first thing, we need a SIM. We need an EDR. We need a managed service. We need, what's the third solution that we're doing? So we need some new talent in-house. So we actually added that as well. So we added a security staffing division to help that piece of it as well. So to give you an idea of the cybersecurity market size, it was valued at $150 billion in 2019. And that is expected to grow to $300 billion by 2027. And Alacrity is well positioned to consolidate the many fragmented aspects of the security marketplace and offer our customers more integrated and easier to manage solutions. And we will continue to help our customers select the best suite of solutions to address all types of cybersecurity threats. You know, it's such a really important point you're making because, you know, the tools just have piled up in the tool shed, I call it like that. It's like, you don't even know it's in there anymore. And then you got to support them. Then the world's change, you get cloud native, the service area is increasing. And then the CISOs are also challenged. Do I have any clouds do I build on? Do I optimize my development teams for AWS or Azure? I mean, now that's kind of a factor. So you have all this tooling going on there, building their own stuff, they're building their own core competency. And yet the CISO still needs to be like maintaining kind of like a relevance list. That's almost like a stock market for the products. You're providing that. It sounds like you're providing that kind of service as well, is that right? We distill all of the products that are out there. There's thousands of cybersecurity products out there in the marketplace. When we kind of do all that distillation for the customer, we find using a combination of things. We use Forester and Gartner and all the market analysts to shortlist our solutions that we offer customers. But then we also use our experience. And so since 2013, we've been deploying these solutions across organizations and corporations across America. And we've gained a large body of experience. And we can take that experience and knowledge to our customers and help them make some good decisions. So they don't have to go through the pitfalls that many companies do when selecting these type of solutions. Well, congratulations, you've got a great business. And that's just a basic service making things easier for the CISO more so they can be safe and secure in their environment. It's funny, cyber warfare, the private companies have to fight their own battles, got to build their own armies. Certainly the government's not helping them and they're confused even how to handle all this stuff. So they need your service. I'm just curious, as this continues to unfold and you start to see much more of a holistic view, what's the IBM angle in here? Why are you such a big partner of theirs? Is it because their customers are working with you, they're bringing you into business? Is it because you have an affinity towards some of their products? What's the connection with IBM? All of the above. So I think it probably started with our affinity to IBM Q-Radar product and we have a lot of expertise in that solution. So that's where it started. And then I think IBM's leadership in this space has been remarkable really. So like what's happening now with the IBM cloud pack for security, building a security platform to allow all these point solutions to work together. That's the roadmap we want to put our customers on because we believe that's the future for this marketplace. Yeah, and the vision of hybrid cloud having that underpinning be with Red Hat. It's a Linux kernel model of all things. Yes, Kubernetes, you can run it on Azure, IBM cloud, AWS, it's portable. I mean, yeah, all this openness. As you probably know, cybersecurity is really a lagging in the security and the information technology space as far as adopting open standards. And IBM is I think leading that charge and you'll be able to have a force multiplier. With the open standards in the space. Open innovation with open source is incredible. I mean, if open source can embrace a common platform and build that kind of control plane and openness to allow thriving companies to just build out, then you have an entire hybrid distributed architecture. Yeah, well, I think companies want to use the best and breed. So when we show these solutions to customers, they want the best and breed. They always say, I don't, when it comes to security, they don't want second best. They want the best that's out there because they're securing their crown jewels. So that makes sense. So the problem is, you know, having all these different disparate solutions that are all top in their category, none of them talk to each other. So we need to address that problem because without that being solved, this is just gonna be a more, it's gonna compound the complexity of the problems we solve day to day. Awesome, congratulations, Brian. Great story, you know, entrepreneur built a great business over the years. I think the product's amazing. I think that's exactly what the market needs and just shows you what the ecosystem's all about. This is the power of the ecosystem. You know, a thousand flowers are blooming. You got a great product IBM's helping as well. Good partnership, network effect builds in and still a lot more to do. Congratulations. Absolutely. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier with IBM Thinks 2021 Virtual Coverage. Thanks for watching.