A privately held cybersecurity company involved in the detection and prevention of cybersecurity attacks. Our client provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.
The Challenge
A Private Equity firm merged two acquisitions and launched a cybersecurity company. Leadership realized they needed a partner to help grow topline revenues, while optimizing the engineering spend for non-core products. The additional challenge was to reduce operational overhead and ongoing risks on non-strategic products, while keeping customers engaged, improving CSAT, and extending the life of existing products.
The Solution
Persistent employed multiple “levers” to enable the client to master these challenges — including scalable engineering, captive center evaluation, mature product carve-out and professional services. We began by designing an outcome-based e2e engineering ownership model — balancing the context and product knowledge with the right team composition — including existing and augmented Persistent employees.
This required setting up a dedicated Global Technology Center in an offshore location (India), as well as near-shore locations across the US and Europe. Persistent recognized the need to retain tribal knowledge and domain expertise to manage the complexity of the client’s Cybersecurity products, so we engaged an expert team to seed the transition and de-risk client deliverables and commitments. And we ensured the continuity of existing teams while expanding them with a transition-ready group of domain experts. Persistent also focused considerable effort on achieving the desired cost savings without compromising on delivery, quality, or velocity, and with improved customer retention. After taking over complete product management responsibility, within weeks we stood up a team to handle all critical work for client products, manage the operational transition, and support existing customers with guaranteed SLAs and zero disruption.
The Outcome
Persistent reached “steady state” (post transition) in just 1-1/2 months, and within six months we onboarded a team of 250+ technologists.
Contractually, Persistent committed to five-year cost savings of 30%, beginning in Year One, and we have already delivered savings greater than 25%. To date, the non-strategic products portfolio managed by Persistent has generated $100M+ in revenue. We currently support ~25% of the client’s products for more than 1,000 enterprise customers, which has been achieved with zero knowledge transition cost.
