Meanwhile, Pennington moved from Santa Clara headquarters to open a Houston office of WhiteHat.
FORBES: Managing Growth: How WhiteHat Security Wins As It Tops 100 People
But WhiteHat figures that it has barely scratched the surface of the market opportunity.
So in 2001, he started WhiteHat Security to see if he could solve the problem.
It looks like WhiteHat is on the path to adapting its organization as it scales.
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
WhiteHat Security is a leader in protecting corporate networks from all sorts of nastiness.
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
After recently celebrating its first decade, WhiteHat is trying to take a bigger share of the pie.
To reach those customers, WhiteHat uses a mix of channel partners, enterprise sales, and so-called inside sales people.
When Pennington teamed up with Jeremiah Grossman to start WhiteHat in 2001, he was pursuing his interest in securing network infrastructure.
FORBES: Managing Growth: How WhiteHat Security Wins As It Tops 100 People
But the 2011 capital was intended to take advantage of what WhiteHat sees as an opportunity to build on its industry leadership.
WhiteHat employed between 40 and 60 people for three or four years.
FORBES: Managing Growth: How WhiteHat Security Wins As It Tops 100 People
And by the end of 2012, WhiteHat expects to employ over 200.
Shulte and DeFrank both have impressive backgrounds that should help prepare WhiteHat to strengthen its organization as it grows to the next level.
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
And compared to consultants, WhiteHat offers enterprises an irresistible value proposition.
So to get more insight on the issues, I talked to the folks at WhiteHat Security, which is a leader in providing security for websites.
In recent years, WhiteHat has closed many multi-million dollar deals and in the last nine to 12 months, its employee base has soard from 80 to 200.
FORBES: Managing Growth: How WhiteHat Security Wins As It Tops 100 People
And in order to avoid the risk of losing those talented people, WhiteHat promotes them to team leaders, research and development people, quality assurance, and sales jobs.
FORBES: Managing Growth: How WhiteHat Security Wins As It Tops 100 People
To help grab a bigger share of this market pie, WhiteHat employs 140 people about 60% or 70% of whom do product development or customer service.
The apparently Chinese cybercriminals are using Google searches to track down sites vulnerable to so-called "SQL injections, " says Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer of security firm Whitehat Security.
Since the channel partners have established trusted relationships with customers, Fohn believes that it makes the most sense for WhiteHat to reach those enterprises through the channel partners.
This means that WhiteHat has created different layers of management.
FORBES: Managing Growth: How WhiteHat Security Wins As It Tops 100 People
WhiteHat has also changed its organization as it has grown.
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
Jeremiah Grossman is CTO of WhiteHat Security.
FORBES: 7 Things You Need To Know About Recent Web Hack Attacks
To keep up, WhiteHat is scaling its organization hiring senior finance and HR executives to make sure that it has the systems in place to maintain its excellent reputation as it adds more people.
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
Whitehat Security's Grossman speculates that machines running that software were targeted because they allow several commands to be injected in a single user input field on the sites they host, making those sites easier to hijack.
The goal is for the systems and processes that Fohn, Schulte, and DeFrank develop is to preserve the best of WhiteHat so that its existing customers do more business with the company even as it attracts new ones.
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
FORBES: WhiteHat Security's Organization Scales With Its Customer Base
In its report, Whitehat credits the steady drop in web vulnerabilities to a combination of factors: An increase in regulatory compliance, clients and business partners who increasingly enforce security standards on companies, community awareness campaigns, and an increase in cybercrime that has pressured firms to secure themselves.
FORBES: Researchers Say The Web May Be Offering Fewer Footholds To Hackers
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