Specialist
Former Senior Manager at Carbon Black Inc
Agenda
- Endpoint cybersecurity industry overview, including key trends and growth drivers
- Differentiation between key players and competitive advantages
- Carbon Black's (NASDAQ: CBLK) technical strengths and competitive moat
- Penetration of the large enterprise security market
- Future growth drivers and potential risks for Carbon Black
Questions
1.
What is your bird’s eye perspective of the security endpoint market? Which key trends or developments would you highlight in the sector?
2.
Are you aware of any headwinds or tailwinds for the industry overall, aside from market share dynamics?
3.
You mentioned a slowdown and the change in how customers shop for security endpoint solutions –how has this changed over the years?
4.
What inning are we in in terms of the industry displacing traditional antivirus as a whole?
5.
How would you say Carbon Black’s portfolio as a whole is positioned vs peers? Do you have any market share figures? Have there been any shifts between Carbon Black and other players recently?
6.
What order would you stack or position each of the players in terms of market share capture?
7.
How would the share ranking change if we revisit that over maybe the next year? Would the top three still be the top three? Do you expect any shifts, what would it take to maybe displace the leaders?
8.
Would you say Cylance was non-existent after BlackBerry or before?
9.
You mentioned how the overall space is getting commoditised. What happens to the top players from here, specifically CrowdStrike?
10.
You said Carbon Black doubled down on tier 1 channel partners, and those are the channel partners that obviously buy some of these solutions for their customers. Was that a doubling down on the tier 1 channel partners to Carbon Black’s detriment?
11.
What do you see as current penetration vs greenfield opportunity in EDR for Carbon Black?
12.
To what extent could enterprises opting for suites such as those of Palo Alto’s, for example, be detrimental to more pure play endpoint providers such as Carbon Black?
13.
What are some of the strengths and weaknesses within Carbon Black’s portfolio? Which areas perform incredibly well, which need a little more work and which are best positioned to expand cloud growth, etc?
14.
How well do you see Carbon Black serving the SMB vs the mid-market vs the large enterprises? How can it further penetrate the underserved customer segments?
15.
How big of an opportunity is cross-selling for Carbon Black with its current customer base? To what extent can it grow the contract value by selling Response to the Defense audience, for example?
16.
How different is Carbon Black’s approach to new product launches vs a year ago? You mentioned how Carbon Black combined multiple solutions into one, which caused a bit of a disruption. Are they approaching new product launches any differently now?
17.
How do you think the other general sales resources are positioned to grow and scale the business? Are there any trends in the average length of the sales cycle that you could point us to?
18.
What are some potential challenges facing Carbon Black from a sales execution standpoint in the short-to-medium term?
19.
Are there any common reasons why clients would leave the platform?
20.
How does Carbon Black’s pricing compare vs peers? How does it stack up?
21.
Is there room to expand or optimise the channel strategy?
22.
You mentioned SOAR vs endpoint. Who do you think is best positioned in SOAR?
23.
Are there any product categories adjacent to what Carbon Black is currently working on which makes sense to move into? What could provide longer-term growth?
24.
Where do you think Carbon Black needs to focus its R&D efforts?
25.
Carbon Black’s management team has had a few execution issues over the past few quarters. Do you think it is fully recovered, what are your general thoughts on that?
26.
What are some of the biggest risk factors facing Carbon Black over the next 2-3 years?
27.
You mentioned some consolidation in the space. Why do you think Elastic acquired Endgame?
28.
Do you have any additional commentary about Carbon Black or the next-gen endpoint security sector?
