Sword & Shield Enterprise Security

As customers have become more familiar with security offerings in the market, they’ve begun doing more of their product integration themselves, said Sword & Shield CEO Will Henderson. Yet what that’s done is simply enabled Henderson’s seven-year-old company to keep looking to the future.

After a very tough 2001, an environment that continued through the first quarter of 2002, Sword & Shield has enjoyed steady revenue growth. By developing expertise in such areas as security audits and network vulnerability testing, Henderson was able to augment product sales and boost revenue by $1 million last year to reach $4.9 million in 2003.

Security product sales remain an important part of the business, though, accounting for 78 percent of revenue. Henderson said it is important to stay one step ahead of your customers.

“In the last year, we’ve started working on going from promoting the fast-selling products to looking at new products so we could show our customers something they haven’t seen before,” he said.

A little more than three years ago, the company launched an e-commerce site. Even though less than 10 percent of the firm’s sales are made over the Web, the site’s real value lies elsewhere. “On the product side, probably 75 percent of our leads come through the Web,” Henderson said.

Sword & Shield is also finding growing opportunities implementing solutions that address both network management and security management issues. “You can add a lot of value with products that overlap the two spaces,” Henderson said.

 Published for the Week Of March 29, 2004