Abstracts.

Nick Tarsi: Cybersecurity

Fortune 100 Cybersecurity Company has been an industry leader for decades and primarily works with enterprise customers. The company helps manage digital risk with expertise and products that include threat detection and response, identity and access management, and fraud prevention.

The Challenge

After leading the market for more than 20 years, this cybersecurity enterprise was looking for a strategic refresh of the P&P for their Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. Well-funded SaaS competitors were starting to eat into their market share and the company wanted to reverse that trend.

The company had seen friction acquiring new customers through its channel and there was a worry of moving traditional perpetual customers over to term-based license models. High-discount expectations plus a tedious and manual operational setup concerned the company about how they were perceived in the market. 



My Role

Project Manager, Delivery Support

My role on this project comprised of two key responsibilities:

  • Manage the project and all stakeholders to make sure all work streams were on-schedule (with dependencies throughout the project) and that deadlines were met.
  • Led research (primary and secondary) and discovery activities (interviews, onboarding documentation, etc.) that were critical to understanding both the company and market. This research was the foundation used to build out the new Pricing and Packaging (P&P) strategy. 
The Work
  • Our team completed 55 interviews (internal and external) with over a 100 individuals to understand the problems in the company and the opportunity in the market, in addition to extensive secondary research.
  • Problems identified included a “legacy brand,” an under-performing new logo acquisition and an overly complex solution set.
  • After compiling a summary of findings from the discovery phase, we made recommendations for an updated P&P model, which were accepted by the executive team.
  • We then validated it would set the company up for long-term success and profitability through a financial modeling exercise.
The Outcome

Orchid Black and the client were able to work together to create a new P&P (with an entry-level, cloud-first solution) for this long-standing IAM product that positioned the company for long-term growth. The financial model validated the recommended P&P, and the company moved forward with the implementation of this strategy. The pre-implementation risks and roadmap our team put together set the foundation for the company to move forward into the execution phase for this project. 

Stakeholder Sentiment Analysis
“

'Don’t fix what’s not broken.' This is too often the mantra of companies with a long history of success. However, (especially in technology) complacency will result in a slow death. It’s the companies that know this and are aggressive to counteract inertia will rise (and stay) at the top.

”
––Nick Tarsi, Project Manager