Short-listing Cybersecurity Vendors

I am building what I call The Analyst Dashboard for cybersecurity. In January, for the third year running, I will be pulling together all the data on 2,680+ vendors of cybersecurity products for publication as Security Yearbook 2022. Every year people ask for a digital version. So, this year I will build a dashboard to let subscribers mine my data.

I have identified the following use cases for the Dashboard

-Industry analysts. This is easy because I need the tool for my own work. I just need to build something that is more useful than a large spreadsheet.

-Investors. Private Equity and VCs all have their own spreadsheets. Based on their frequent claims of 3,500-5,000 vendors I suspect that they do not have very good filters on what a security vendor is. If you grab every company with the tag “cybersecurity" from Pitchbook, Crunchbase, or CBI you get 5-6,000 companies. I did that several years ago. After doing a diff with my own data and eliminating resellers, integrators, and consultants, I only found about 100 that I had not already included. I also found that most of the databases accept the vendor’s own description and categorization. There is no curation by an industry analyst.

-Vendors are often investors too. They also need to track competitors, model Total Addressable Market (TAM), and create battle cards for their field sales teams.

-End users.?Anyone who is responsible for selecting and evaluating cybersecurity solutions needs a short-list to start with. Many use Gartner Magic Quadrants for this. Some do a search on a solution type and pick vendors from the first page of results.

I need help with vendor selection use case. CISOs already use Security Yearbook for vendor selection. In the Directory I list vendors by category and country. I also include head count and growth in head count. All good information for creating that short-list. What data can I collect to make a better vendor selection tool?

Here is what I track and update every quarter:

Company name

Category

Sub-category

Head count

Recent investment

Total investment

Year founded

HQ address

Names of CEO, CMO, VP sales, and CFO

Here for instance is the number of vendors founded each year.

My question is, what other data would be useful for vendor selection??Keep in mind that I use zero vendor provided information. Surveying vendors is the time honored method used by IDC, Gartner, and Forrester. It is hard to get responses from product teams that are already overworked responding to all those surveys.

We had a discussion within the Analyst Syndicate last year and came up with more ideas.

-Number of job postings on each vendor’s career page. If a company has a lot of openings they must be doing well, right?

-All office locations

-Previous company for key personnel

-Known customers

-Resellers/Partners

-Security ratings from one of the 3rd party risk score solutions

-CVEs for their products.

-Press releases.

I would love more suggestions. What do you look for when qualifying a vendor for your short-list?