StackPath: Can Lance Crosby Win Round Two?

On May 6, 2016, Symantec’s CEO at the time, Michael A. Brown said that the internet threat environment will cost our global economy between $2 trillion to $3 trillion annually. This week after a year in pre-op Lance Crosby just launched his new company, StackPath, an internet security company tailored to meet that threat. In building the new business, he has taken a road that I did not expect but one that has a high probability to be successful.

StackPath as a name fairly well sums up the game plan, as well as the title to its website: Intelligent Web Services for Security, Speed and Scale. To deliver these services StackPath acquired four diverse companies in the hosting and security sectors: MaxCDN, Fireblade, Cloak, and Staminus.

The goal is to integrate these firms to provide a cohesive solution. This single unified platform will provide a web application firewall, server content delivery, VPN, API, and DDos mitigation all in one consistent StackPath-branded service.

Here is a quick look at these four firms and what products they each contribute to what looks to become an integrated solution that gets smarter:

  • MaxCDN makes content move faster. The company over 15,000 customers worldwide including DevOps teams inside Fortune 100 companies. Accelerating advertising, video and games through the network. Headquartered in L.A., this firm has approximately 60 employees
  • Cloak is based in Seattle and was founded in 2011. StackPath purchased this company in April. Cloak is designed to protect the client from security threats when using untrusted and public networks. Services include secure content delivery to computers and mobile devices.
  • Staminus provides DDoS protection and proprietary DDoS technology mitigation security. Its DDoS mitigation application, SecurePort was developed over several years and was first released for internal use in 2002, primarily to protect the company’s hosting clients. Founded in 1998 the firm globally protects 15 million IPs. I would be remiss if I did not note that in March Staminus suffered a significant DDoS breach in which 50GBs of compromised data was published to the web. I presume Crosby has that bottled up with his new technology. Staminus is located in Newport Beach.
  • Fireblade. My guess is that the real powerhouse is Israeli-based Fireblade. It provides intelligent security that learns from the systems failures. In its words: “Fireblade has innovated a behavioral approach to website security, shifting from traditional, costly and obsolete web application firewalls to a modern dynamic approach that relies on users’ behaviors and reputations, rather than signatures. Fireblade’s behavioral security is the completely automated, self-learning, low-touch, low-maintenance, no-headache solution.” This looks like the intelligence that binds the total StackPath solution into one package.

Some of the services, such as Clokes iPhone app, appear that they will be provided as a stand-alone solution. Under pricing, StackPath uses the term “Secure Content Delivery”, with several pricing levels all based on global bandwidth per month. Initial StackPath pricing has five steps; the lowest is at $20/mo and includes up to 200 GB of bandwidth the largest package is $600 for 25 TB of bandwidth.

The combined company should be synergistic. There are some overlaps on the technology side, but I have seen engineers in a room together, it can be enlightening. There should be tremendous synergy in marketing and crossover sales of services. Almost all customers of each solution is a potential buyer of each other’s products and therefore the stack, as in StackPath. Marketing is often the shortcoming of businesses my guess is that MaxCDN has a good team.

StackPath has raised $150 million in funds for the new cybersecurity firm. Funding reportedly came from ABRY Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm. That should be good for round one.

For the best overview of StackPath screen the video on their homepage. You will find that StackPath is going to rely heavily on the artificial intelligence and self-correcting security technology, definitely, a niche well filled by Fireblade.

Timing is right; I have been spending a fair amount of energy over the last couple of months researching the security end of the IT sector for one of my projects. After going over several hundred firms, it appears that StackPath is headed in the right direction. Combining speeding up the system and security is a great marriage.

I can see the firm augmenting this package with additional acquisitions and moving into several verticals. Today StackPath says “more than 30,000 customers, ranging from Fortune 100 companies to early stage startups already use StackPath technology.”

StackPath, however, is not yet available, you can sign up to be notified when it is available. I did.

Later, Tom

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Source: TheWHIR