Armadillo makes loud noise over new vendor Cylance

Security VAR predicts latest vendor signing could make waves in end-point security space

Start-up Cylance could match the impact Norton and Doctor Solomon had on the end-point security market in the 1990s, its first UK reseller partner has predicted.

Armadillo Managed Services, an Uxbridge-based security VAR that helped seed the market for Palo Alto Networks and FireEye, is placing a big bet on Cylance to take the market by storm this year.

Cylance, which scored $43m (£30.3m) in equity investment last summer, claims to apply artificial intelligence to predictively identify and stop cyberattacks before they cause harm.

Armadillo chief operating officer Andy Mayle said he felt Cylance could create waves to rival the impact the first anti-virus solutions made in the early 1990s.

"We view it as the next big one. It is completely different from the standard AV solutions and McAfee and Symantec ought to be watching their backs," he said.

Categorising itself as a "next-generation anti-virus" outfit, Cylance claims to stop 99.9 per cent of cyberattacks before they execute, compared with the 40 per cent of cyberthreats it says traditional AV solutions detect. The firm also sells itself on the low impact it claims to have on users.

"It has a massively lightweight agent on the end-point as there are no signature updates whatsoever," Mayle said.

California-based Cylance scored $42m last July in a Series C funding round led by DFJ Growth and also including Dell Ventures.

It signed Ignition as its first UK distributor in November, the same month Dell integrated its technology into its data protection solutions.

"We are the first UK reseller," Mayle said. "Their demos are impressive and we have lots of purchase orders out there and are waiting for the first one to drop."

Although Armadillo counts on big vendor names such as RSA, F5 and Fortinet to "keep the lights on", it has a history of seeding the market for new security technologies, Mayle said.

"We were the first UK resellers for Palo Alto and FireEye - we are really good at spotting them," he said.