Last July, security firm Rapid7 had its initial public offering, an event that helped to underscore the tremendous demand for security services. While being a public company puts quarterly pressure on management to deliver results, Rapid7 President and CEO Corey Thomas emphasized in a video interview with eWEEK that going public hasn’t changed the way Rapid7 does business.
“If you think about the different obligations of a private company and a public company, in a public company, you just have lots more investors,” Thomas said. “So I do put time into educating our investors about what we’re doing and how we’re approaching the market.”
Rapid7 has multiple product and services in the market today, including a growing number of cloud-delivered offerings that are sold on a subscription basis. The company also some strong open-source roots, with the Metasploit penetration testing framework, which has both free and commercially supported editions available.
“Complex things are solved by creative and innovative people and are also solved by communities,” Thomas said. “So we look to see how we can reach out and support communities and at the same time are also able to create unique IP that we can commoditize because we’re a business and we want to grow.”
Watch the full video interview with Corey Thomas below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.