In an interview with ChannelPro last year, managed services software maker Continuum revealed plans to introduce an end-to-end security offering covering everything from vulnerability assessment and unified threat management to incident response and end user education by the middle of this year.
In a follow-up conversation with ChannelPro this morning, following the Boston-based vendor’s acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC, CEO Michael George made clear that while its timing may have slipped into the fourth quarter, security is still very much in Continuum’s future.
“We will be launching a full-blown comprehensive security offering,” he says, adding that it will include a security operations center (SOC) modeled after the network operations center Continuum already operates, plus everything else managed service providers need to become managed security service providers.
“We will be a master security backend and service delivery platform for the MSP market,” George states.
Per last year’s interview, Continuum still plans to develop some of the intellectual property it needs to realize that objective itself and get the rest from other vendors. The company has existing alliances with Malwarebytes Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., and Webroot Inc., of Broomfield, Colo., George notes, and will partner with or buy additional firms as needed.
“You should anticipate that we’re going to continue to acquire in that category,” George says.
Continuum’s new security operations center, which will operate from dual sites in Mumbai and Pune, India, is still in development.
“We’ve been building out this property for a while,” George says. Jitendra Pathak, Continuum’s senior vice president of NOC services and the person responsible for designing and running telco giant Vodafone’s current security operations center, is heading up that project.
Though Continuum rival ConnectWise launched a network operations center last November, no other major managed services software vendor has a SOC at present, according to George.
