Contrast Security Aims To Drive Growth For AppSec Tool Through Integrations With AWS, VMware, Microsoft

By pre-integrating its code security platform with numerous other technology providers, Contrast Security is seeking to help channel partners to drive increased adoption of the tool.

Contrast Security is looking to make it easier for solution providers to implement the company’s code security tool with customers through newly announced integrations with numerous major technology vendors.

The pre-integrations being announced Wednesday include with AWS, Microsoft, VMware, GitLab Inc., PagerDuty, Zimperium and a number of smaller security tools.

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The integration with VMware includes enabling the Contrast Security tool to work more seamlessly with the VMware Tanzu cloud-native application platform, said Ben Goodman, senior vice president of corporate development and strategic alliances Contrast Security.

“It takes the effort away from the customer of trying to get these two things to work together,” Goodman said. “The reality is without this program, our customers were still making this stuff work together — but the responsibility fell on them to make Tanzu and Contrast work together, or to make a pipeline tool and Contrast work together, or to make an API security tool and Contrast work together.”

Contrast Security supports a number of standards and offers APIs for connecting its tool to other platforms, and so “they probably would make it work. But it would be their responsibility,” he said. Now, with the tool pre-integrated with other platforms, that both reduces their effort and the risk of things not working together correctly, according to Goodman.

“The end result may be the same, but the journey will be much easier,” he said.

That’s potentially a benefit for solution providers who are aiming to deliver technologies to customers as a unified package, with code security as just one component of it. The pre-integrations increases predictability for partners, so that they’ll know that Contrast and another technology they’re recommending to a customer will work together, Goodman said.

In order to help a customer achieve true “end-to-end” DevSecOps — a software development approach that combines development, security and operations — it takes a lot more than just the code security component provided by Contrast Security, said Jimmy Xu, practice director for application security and DevSecOps at Trace3.

But a lot more customers are likely to consider Contrast Security if it’s part of a full platform for DevSecOps that also includes integration with the software development pipeline, cloud infrastructure-as-a-service and API security, Xu said. “When we talk to the customer about what Contrast would do for their entire depth of maturity [on DevSecOps], I think this will allow Contrast to add more points to the score,” he said.

That could mean more business for Trace3, which provides professional services around integrating, automating and deploying solutions for customers that aim to help them achieve a unified DevSecOps approach for their software development work, Xu said.

Trace3’s sales team will also now have a reason to re-engage with customers that already are using the platforms that Contrast Security has been integrated with, he said.

“It’s also an opportunity for our sellers to explain to the customer, ‘Hey, you already have this investment — VMware Tanzu, for example — by adding Contrast you are solving some of the security issues for the applications deployed on [Tanzu]. So I think there’s opportunity for upsell as well,” Xu said.

The integrations for Contrast with smaller security tools include with Noname Security, ArmorCode, Anchore, Ermetic, Neosec, Wallarm, Legit Security, Cloudwize, BLST Security, ProtectOnce and Scribe Security.

In November 2021, Contrast Security raised $150 million in a Series E funding round led by Liberty Strategic Capital, the private equity fund founded by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The company achieved a valuation of more than $1 billion in connection with the funding.