Swimlane outlines regional plans at GITEX 2022

Daniel Shepherd, Deputy Editor, tahawultech.com sat down with Cody Cornell, Swimlane co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Jim Pickering, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Ashraf Sheet, Vice President of Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) to discuss GITEX participation, regional growth and business model differentiation.

Can you tell our readers about some of the solutions and partnerships during GITEX this year?

Ashraf: We’re focusing on our new Swimlane Turbine which is a leading form of security automation. We’re also planning to expand our partnerships across region with focus on the UAE and Saudi Arabia. We’re talking to some of the cybersecurity leaders in the region and have hopes to collaborate with them.

In the last 12 months, how has your company performed in the MENA market? Has your company ventured into any new markets/countries, and can you share your overall growth?

Jim: Swimlane, as a company, has grown 80% year-over-year so we’re enjoying substantial growth. We target large enterprises, governments and defence organisations to provide security automation to. In terms of MENA, we’ve just started our main launch here 90 days ago. Ashraf is an industry veteran here and has built similar teams for Infoblox, he has been instrumental in helping build the program for us.

Which technologies and IT trends are the forefront of driving innovation for your business?

Cody: Organisations are trying to find a way to keep up with the expanding attack surface they have, the number of alerts they receive, and the lack of talent they employ. Automation is the top priority for us, and we focus on low code automation, not just for playbook development but for user experience development. A lot of folks focus exclusively on security operations when automation is more broadly applicable. Anywhere inside of security, be it privacy, data or cloud, will definitively benefit from Automation

Can you tell our readers how your business model has driven key business outcomes for your customers and what differentiates your company from your market rivals?

Cody: We’re one of the largest, stand-alone, security automation platforms whilst others are usually bundled with technologies. For integration and enablement, we believe you need a neutral party as most platforms don’t want to integrate with their competitors. Customers really want someone who’ll come in and participate as an independent party, so they know they’ll get an abstraction layer between their users and network security technologies. Competing products, endpoints or firewalls don’t matter to us and we can integrate them together which is better for the vendor who might not initially want to collaborate together.

Ashraf: We’ve also become more of a business leader; we’ve taken security automation beyond what it was in the region and become a business enabler for a lot of organisations.