LogRhythm’s Logan: company to go “extremely aggressive” to win market share

BOULDER  — Newly minted LogRhythm Inc. CEO Mark Logan has been on the job for just a few weeks, but he believes the Boulder-based cybersecurity company can beat out computing giants in the race to protect company data.

Logan, who started about four weeks ago, was most recently president of Attunity Ltd., a data integration firm in Massachusetts. Logan also had stints in management at Hewlett Packard Enterprises (NYSE: HPE), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and other service-as-a-software (SaaS) companies. 

Attunity was acquired this year by analytics firm Qlik Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The PE fund took a majority stake in LogRhythm last year for an undisclosed sum.

LogRhythm is in the security information and event management (SIEM) segment of the cybersecurity market, which analyzes reported security alerts from a website or server to determine if someone is trying to hack into it.

Logan was hired late last month amid multiple executive shake-ups at the Boulder-based IT security company, including new hires in its chief financial officer and lead engineering positions in recent months. Those new hires came months after private equity firm Thoma Bravo took a majority stake in LogRhythm last July for an undisclosed sum.

A press release announcing Logan’s hire made no mention of Andy Grolnick, who was LogRhythm’s president and CEO of 14 years.

Logan said the new hires came from Thoma Bravo’s desire to continue growing its market share and its products after it was founded 16 years ago.

“To have a founder-led team move through that length and period of time and have that amount of success and growth is very unusual, so what the board elected to do is to further invest in a management team and structure to take this business to the next couple of levels,” he said.

LogRhythm currently has about 700 employees worldwide. He declined to specify the company’s revenue range.

Logan takes the reins at LogRhythm a week after banking giant Capital One disclosed a hacker had compromised more than 200,000 Social Security and bank account numbers from its credit card customers and 1 million Canadian social Insurance cards last week. Credit rating agency Equifax Inc. and hotel chain Marriott Inc. are both still feeling the effects of their major data breaches last year.

That growing worry over protecting user data is partially fueling wide growth in the SIEM market. Earlier this year, the industry analysis firm Research and Markets estimated the SIEM segment could become a $6.24 billion market by 2027 in the U.S. alone.

LogRhythm does have some additional products in its development pipeline, which Logan declined to discuss due to confidentiality. However, he did say the company is planning to get “extremely aggressive” in its pricing in the next several months by offering pricing plans that don’t tie cost to the amount of data protected, and he pitched LogRhythm as the most experienced company currently in the industry.

“Companies should be coming to us; there’s no company that’s been at this business longer than we have,” he said.

But for the short term, LogRhythm is planning to stay private while its major competitors Splunk Inc. (Nasdaq: SPLK), IBM and Dell Inc. (NYSE: DELL) build their SIEM businesses with public backing.

Thoma Bravo has led some of its companies to initial public offerings, most recently with Dynatrace Inc. (NYSE: DT) debuting on markets last week.

Logan said “opportunities will be available” to LogRhythm in the future if it continues to build market share, but he ruled out any plans for an IPO this year.

“I would say that’s not in the short term 2019,” he said.

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