F-Secure’s enterprise-facing business will have a new brand – WithSecure – and a sharpened focus when the company splits into two independent operations.
The move comes a month after the security vendor’s board of directors revealed that the 34-year-old Helsinki-based company would carve out the consumer security business from its enterprise unit. The consumer business will retain the F-Secure name.
The final break will come this summer after a general meeting in May. The split is scheduled to complete on June 30.
Many of the old F-Secure executives, including CEO Juhani Hintikka, are making the move to WithSecure. Splitting the company in two makes sense, given the size of both the corporate and consumer units, and the business momentum each is experiencing, according to Hintikka.
Both operations have more than $100 million in annual revenues, he told The Register.
“That means in practice that some of the original synergies that there were between the two businesses are less relevant nowadays,” the CEO said. “Both businesses have their own go-to-market organizations, their own product portfolio, their own customer description, and so forth. There really are just a few technical elements that both rely on, but the rest is really quite separate.”
According to F-Secure’s 2021 shareholder report [PDF], WithSecure will launch with about 1,300 employees.
Being an independent company will help WithSecure better define itself in an increasingly competitive global security market, Hintikka argued.
“That focus will help us become more agile, have faster time to market and, all in all, just make us more competitive in that sense,” he said. “The other part is that we will be able to communicate the clear story to the markets – who we are and what we stand for and what our customers are, what their problems are. They are quite distinct between consumer and our B2B side. Also, that kind of structure allows us to also potentially then contemplate, for example, raising capital for certain purposes where we can be quite explicit about the business we’re going after rather than an average of averages.”
Such a focus will also help the new company’s third-party sellers, who have in the past had to spend the first 15 minutes with corporate customers explaining the differences between what F-Secure’s enterprise unit offered and what the consumer operations had in its portfolio.
The CEO noted that when organizations searched the F-Secure name online, it is the company’s consumer-related products that get the most attention – even though it is the smaller of the two business units.
Hintikka said WithSecure will compete in a global market in which many of the companies are similar, with comparable products and skills. The company offers a range of products and services, addressing such areas as endpoint security, managed detection and response (MDR), collaboration protection for Salesforce and Microsoft 365, and vulnerability management.
He also pointed to the company’s consultants – who work with enterprises to address their security needs – as another asset for the company.
“The things that differentiate us are this combination of expertise and great technology, but in the heart of our brand and what we stand for is actually something we call good partnership,” the CEO said.
“It simply means that this is so complex, and it’s evolving so fast, that it’s hard for anybody to claim that they can solve all cybersecurity challenges alone. When we talk about security, it is something we do in partnership with our customers, with our partners.”
It also helps that WithSecure is a European company. In today’s political climate, the demand for data sovereignty and privacy is growing worldwide – nowhere more so than in Europe, where much of that demand is addressed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which carries heavy potential penalties for violations.
The European Union earlier this month fined Meta – formerly Facebook – more than $18 million for GDPR violations tied to data breaches.
“In practice, for many of the corporate customers, it is the thought that is related to how we control the access to the data,” Hintikka said. “Clearly in some countries, it is seen as a problem if data is outside of the country borders or if there is a fear – even a theoretical possibility – that a foreign government could get access to that data. That seems to matter more than it did before.” ®