Bit9 + Carbon Black emerges as Carbon Black

Bit9 is an established vendor in the endpoint protection market. Originally known for its whitelisting capabilities, it developed its offerings in recent years and became known also for application and device control, and for advanced threat protection.

In today’s world, with breaches seemingly everyday news, organisations are realising that, whilst protection is a good strategy, it is not by itself enough. The ability to recover from an incident requires a combination of protection capabilities with those for detecting threats and responding to incidents that occur to limit the damage caused.

Enter Carbon Black. Bit9 acquired Carbon Black in 2014. Back then, it was emerging as a serious contender in the threat detection and response space. Just a start-up, it had just a couple of dozen customer wins under its belt. But it was considered by many to be an emerging leader.

To signal the significance of this acquisition, Bit9 changed its name to Bit9 + Carbon Black, seeing the sense of underlining the importance of providing end-to-end capabilities for dealing with advanced threats. It also continued its capabilities of integrating with complementary technologies in areas such as network security, analytics and SIEM, both through direct integrations and by providing open APIs to enable customers to make the best of their existing investments to provide the critical information needed for incident response. It also provided customers with threat intelligence capabilities in the form of threat indicators, reputation feeds and attack classifications from both internal and third-party threat feeds. Such services help organisations to understand the latest threats seen in order to improve threat detection, prioritisation and response.

Now an essential part of the overall company, Carbon Black has grown from strength to strength on the basis of its highly innovative technology. Whilst the Bit9 and Carbon Black products could still be purchased independently, most customers chose not to do so, seeing the value of the combined proposition. The value of both brands has expanded considerably.

The acquisition has been a major success. So much so, that the time came to consolidate the two brands. Bit9 and Carbon Black turned to the market to gauge how customers perceived the branding. Should it keep the combined name, go back to Bit9 or settle on Carbon Black? The answers that it received showed a clear preference for the Carbon Black name, showing the momentum that the Carbon Black technology and team has brought to Bit9, bringing brand equity and resonating well with its target market.

The name change is about bringing greater clarity under one unified and powerful brand. Product names are changing so that they are more in line with what the products actually are for. The Bit9 Security Platform becomes Carbon Black Enterprise Protection; the Carbon Black product becomes Carbon Black Enterprise Response; and the Threat Intelligence Cloud becomes Carbon Black Threat Intel. Simple. As the saying goes, “it does what is says on the tin.” Other than that, the roadmap points in the same direction, and partnership and investor strategies remain the same.

Already named as the market leader in the next-generation endpoint protection market by IDC, with a 37% market share, this name change will cement the new Carbon Black’s commitment to continued innovation, bringing advanced capabilities to incident response teams, managed security services providers and enterprises in their fight against ever more complex and sophisticated advanced threats.