WatchGuard Technologies today announced the acquisition of CyGlass Technology Services, a provider of cloud and network-centric threat detection and response solutions. CyGlass’s 100% cloud native platform utilizes advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to deliver enterprise-class cyberdefense across hybrid networks to midsize and small organizations. The CyGlass technology will add to the WatchGuard Unified Security Platform architecture, delivering AI-based detection of network anomalies with a future Network Detection and Response (NDR) service, and will accelerate Open eXtended detection and response (XDR) capabilities within WatchGuard ThreatSync, according to WatchGuard.
“We’re always looking to add more things to our platform, but one of the key components has always been around network discovery, detection, and remediation, NDR,” says WatchGuard CEO Prakash Panjwani (pictured). The AI-based service is cloud based, with no hardware requirement, and it’s “easy to deploy and accessible to pretty much all segments from a price perspective.”
That’s a perfect fit for WatchGuard’s mission, WatchGuard’s Panjwani adds, “which has always been about bringing enterprise-grade security and making it accessible to organizations of all sizes … and then of course it has to work for the MSPs because that’s who we sell through.”
CyGlass, based in Littleton, Mass., completed a management buyout from the Nominet UK group in June 2022 and was 100% employee owned at the time of acquisition. The terms of the WatchGuard acquisition are not being disclosed. According to CyGlass, it closed a record 2021 with 400% year-over-year bookings growth in 2021 after tripling its customer base and partner network from the previous year.
Panjwani says the entire R&D team is joining WatchGuard, and they are hoping to not only bring over other employees and contractors but to add to the team. “We’re actually going to add to the team over the next six months very aggressively to make sure we can deliver on their own roadmap, but also on the integrated roadmap we have put together. So there’ll be significant investment behind that team on the go-to-market side.” Ed Jackowiak, founder and CEO of CyGlass, will be staying on to help with the transition.
In addition, he says, WatchGuard considers it “very important that we take care of their [CyGlass] current partners as well … their footprint has been growing over the last 12, 15 months and we want to keep that going. So we definitely want to make sure we sustain that momentum that they’ve already got going in the market on their own.”
WatchGuard will initially offer the network detection and response service (NDaaS) through the Unified Security Platform as a standalone service “but integrated into our platform, which means managed from the same place where our MSP partners are managing the rest of WatchGuard services,” Panjwani says. He expects the service to be available in six to nine months.
“But then the next phase after that is even the more exciting phase for me personally, which is about telemetry, which is we can take advantage of our XDR engine [Threatsync] combined with what they bring and actually create an Open XDR platform.”
