Cloud Security Vendor iBoss Bulks Up To Handle Growing Client Base

Cloud security vendor iBoss wants to grab a bigger share of the growing market for secure web gateways, and it's looking to double its staff to about 400, partly by moving closer to where that talent can be found.

iBoss has shifted its headquarters from San Diego to Boston, in part to allow the company to recruit from a talent pool near firms as Carbon Black, Mimecast and Rapid7 and the North American base for other firms such as Sophos and Kaspersky Lab.

iBoss President and co-founder Peter Martini says the company's client base is expanding internationally. The company says its client list numbers more than 4,000.

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"The level of talent in Boston [is] very, very robust," iBoss President and co-founder Peter Martini told CRN. "You really can't beat it."

The 200 employees iBoss plans to hire would be about evenly split between Boston and San Diego, where iBoss will still maintain a significant presence, Martini said. It's especially looking to add people with a "strong background" in Software as a Service to its leadership team, he added.

iBoss opened its new 23,000-square-foot headquarters in downtown Boston on Wednesday – not far from its Boston office that it opened last year - during a press conference with Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker.

The company makes a distributed gateway platform to help better secure distributed organizations. About two-thirds of its sales come via channel partners, and the company has about 180 channel partners in North America.

The company says its platform, which has been installed at more than 4,000 client organizations globally and the new Boston location will help with global growth. From Boston, Martini said, "we can easily commute back and forth" between the hemispheres.

The company's partners include channel heavyweights CDW, Presidio and Optiv, as well as "a lot of regional partners," Martini said. "We're focused on the mid- to large enterprise and as we expand, we're focusing on bringing on distributors."

The platform allows organizations to do a "drop and replacement" for legacy solutions, Martini said. "Our channel strategy is simple: If you're selling a legacy product right now in the channel … you're not really selling for the future."

The challenge is that many businesses don't want to rearchitect their infrastructures for the cloud just yet, Martini added.

While many businesses will accept an enticement of tax breaks to move operations to different geographies, the headquarters move will actually cost iBoss more in taxes, as well as a higher cost of living compared with San Diego, according to Martini. But those costs are not the big issue, he said.

"At the end of the day, the most expensive thing is [the] opportunity costs" associated with not being able to serve clients, he told CRN. "It's much more expensive every day that goes by without filling a role or filling a role with the right people than it is."