Recently had a great conversation with Neill Feather, President of Sitelock, and it turned out much better than expected. Doing all the research in the world is great, but it only goes so far. On the other hand, great conversation is worth ten thousand words, because it captures the passion, intellect, vision, and leadership of a company in a moment of time.
The first thought that popped to mind during the conversation was “these guys really understand the market place, and they know exactly what they are doing.” They’re not figuring things out, they have figured them out already. Neill is like Phil Goldsmith of EdgeCast, both are technical, charismatic, and their salesmanship is unrivaled.
Sitelock defines itself as a “global leader of website security”. We define them as one of the leading CybeSecurity CDNs in the world. Why? In our ecosystem, CyberSecurity means securing the edge. And CDN is synonymous with global scale, thousands of servers in deployment, Tbps of bandwidth capacity to absorb DDoS attacks, and scales on the fly. The bottom line is no way a company can offer protection against large global DDoS attack without CDN infrastructure, including Palo Alto. Sitelock has created a market for itself. It is a hybrid like Aryaka Networks. Sitelock has the first mover advantage, and revenue to back up that claim.
What better way to describe the awesomeness of Sitelock, then to compare them against regular joe CloudFlare.
| CloudFlare | Sitelock |
| Loud, public, boastful, PR machine |
Private, keeps to self, secretive, executes like crazy |
| VC valued at $1B+ | Bizety valued at $1B |
| 1.9M Non-paying customers | 1M+ paying customers |
| $40M in annual revenue | Did not want to release revenue, but the tone of his voice gave him away – My guess is they do 2x CloudFlare revenue |
| Rolls out SSL and whole world knows about it       | Secretly and furiously rolling out new features without alerting the competition. |
| Matthew Prince – Harvard Grad | Neill Feather: Wharton Grad |
| HQ: San Francisco | HQ: Scottsdale |
RecapÂ
- Sitelock is the leader in their sector
- They figured it out the market, years before the competition
- Opposite of CloudFlare, which makes them dangerous
- Feature innovation machine
- Revenue generating machine