With Importance Comes Duty

Tanium as one of the 25 most important private companies

Fortune Magazine recently named Tanium one of the 25 most important private companies of 2016, recognizing the most influential private enterprises for their “prodigious revenues or assets, their social currency, their deep connection to our daily lives and their disruptive impact.” It’s an honor to be included among such an impressive list of companies challenging the status quo, in some cases changing the course of history, such as Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX and our partner, PwC. You may not associate an enterprise software company with having a “deep connection to our daily lives”, but cybersecurity is something that impacts all of us as consumers, employees, patients and individuals, and is one of the existential threats to the companies, governments and infrastructure that define and operate our daily lives. That’s why this honor is so profound for all of us at Tanium. It’s more than a job. It’s a mission.

We are on a mission to empower the world’s leading organizations to securely operate and innovate with game-changing efficiencies. We invented a fundamentally new approach to security and systems management, with a platform that enables IT to communicate with every device across their enterprise within seconds. What this means is that instead of living in a black hole of visibility, Security and IT Operations teams can simply ask a question (think Google for your IT data), get an answer back from every device – no matter where it’s located – and take action as needed, all within seconds. With this level of visibility and control, organizations can remove the barriers which hamper innovation, whether it’s securely moving to the cloud, hunting, detecting and responding to security attacks, or reclaiming unnecessary software and hardware expenses. One of our customers said it best: “The only limit to Tanium is your imagination.” With a little imagination, Tanium unlocks a whole new world for IT.

Fortune described Tanium as the “Usain Bolt of cybersecurity.”

A fitting description which gets to the heart of Tanium in three distinct ways:

Speed is at the core of our technology – because it matters most

IT and Security teams have threats continuously coming in from all angles, and they need to move faster than ever. They are asked to deliver more services to customers and employees, more protection against those who want to steal critical information assets, and do this all at a lower cost to the business. The problem is that these teams are relying on tools built to fight the war and solve the problems of twenty years ago, not those of today. The impact of legacy tools is latent data, and therefore an incomplete and outdated view of the IT environment. So when IT needs to know what is going on – at that exact moment – they have to settle for data that is hours, days or weeks old, by which point the environment has changed or the damage is done. As one of our customers said, “it’s like trying to chip away at an iceberg with a toothpick.” This is why our promise of 15-second visibility and control at enterprise scale is so revolutionary. By providing visibility and control at a speed 10,000 times faster than anything IT has seen before, Tanium puts IT back in the driver’s seat.

Our growth velocity is validation we’re doing something right

We have received a lot of industry attention about the speed of our growth. We’re proud of our momentum, as more than half of the Fortune 100 already use Tanium in production, and this swift rise in customer adoption is validation that we’re doing something right. It reinforces our commitment to helping our customers solve real problems and keeps us focused on our path forward in creating a platform without limits. With every module that we develop on our platform, our vision is to disrupt a new market and provide a compliment or alternative to the incumbent tools in that market. It’s validation that our company has a deeper meaning of existence, that our invention has real value for the people who are fighting the good fight everyday to protect our critical information and keep the IT trains running on time. We are empowering these teams to work faster, smarter and more efficiently so we as consumers can be more productive, safe and happy in our own daily lives. It’s validation that we are on the path to building a lasting company.

We cannot wait another minute

Even with record levels of IT security spending, breaches continue to occur at an alarming rate. It’s time for us as an industry to challenge the status quo, and not just with more marketing noise, but with real solutions to these real, important problems. Our goal – our duty – at Tanium is to do just this. As part of this mission, I’m personally thrilled to see our inaugural customer conference come to life. Our customers, partners and industry leaders will CONVERGE in San Francisco this October for a week of education, sharing of ideas and unlocking the imagination of Tanium as a platform for IT transformation in their organizations. How many times have you been to a tech conference that feels more like a marketing event? We’re creating the opposite experience – the ‘anti-conference’. We’re creating a forum that doesn’t look in the rearview mirror, but instead is at the forefront of where the industry is headed. A forum void of marketing fluff. A forum where industry leaders can come together to learn from each other and get inspired to solve these important challenges in new and innovative ways.

Conclusion

Think of life before Google. How did you gather information when you needed it, or answer a question? Did you go to a library? Open up an encyclopedia? Ask a friend and trust they had the correct information? Google has made information accessible and relevant to everyone, and in the process has made the world smarter. This is what we do for IT, and ultimately an entire business, at Tanium. This accessibility to relevant information about what’s happening within IT, as it’s happening, will fundamentally change enterprise IT for decades to come.

One difference between Tanium and Usain Bolt: we don’t have a finish line. We will never stop in the quest for innovation. How many times have you said to yourself, “What did we do before Google?” In the not too distant future, our belief is that IT will be saying, “What did we do before Tanium?”

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About the Author: As Tanium’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jennifer Johnson is responsible for global marketing strategy and execution and leads the communications, demand generation and product marketing functions. Prior to Tanium, Jennifer was a Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where she worked closely with its enterprise portfolio companies on go-to-market strategy. Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Jennifer was Chief Marketing Officer at Coverity (acquired by Synopsys in 2014) where she was instrumental in accelerating the company’s growth, expanding into new markets and building the development testing category. Prior to Coverity, Jennifer led product marketing for the IT process automation and IT change management product lines at HP Software. Jennifer has also held marketing roles at Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), Symantec and Veritas Software. Jennifer holds an MBA from Santa Clara University.