Performanta latest to attract private equity backing

Private equity (PE) has clearly understood the benefits of investing in the channel, with Beech Tree the latest to increase its involvement with the market with an investment in Performanta.

The decision to put money into a managed security services provider (MSSP) makes sense given the strength of that market. The terms of the investment were not disclosed, but typically Beech Tree puts between £10m and £40m into a business.

Performanta guides customers through their security strategy and provides full managed detection and response and incident response services. As well as the UK, the firm operates in South Africa, Germany, Australia and the US.

One of the advantages of PE is that it usually speeds up the plans held by a channel firm’s management, and Beech Tree has already indicated it will put more resources into the CORE product from the MSSP.

CORE is a cloud-based offering that has been developed by Performanta that gives customers a chance to get a complete view of their security environment to make sure they can keep on top of their compliance needs and can roll out the latest security controls.  

At the same time as announcing the deal, a couple of personnel changes were signalled with the former vice-president and general manager of EMEA at Alert Logic, William Morrish, coming on board as group chief revenue officer, and Tim Collins as CFO. Paul Franks and Adam Rudd from Beech Tree Private Equity have also joined the board as non-executive directors.

“We have built a strong relationship with Beech Tree due to its strong sector insights, and are pleased to be partnering to help accelerate our growth to the next level, providing cyber safety to the global market,” said Guy Golan, CEO of Performanta.

“We are a customer-centric organisation, and so this investment is great news for our customers as it will enable us to continue to expand our high-quality offering to our global customer base. We are looking forward to accelerating our growth so we can enable more businesses to operate in a secure environment,” he added.

Adam Rudd, director at Beech Tree Private Equity, said that the experiences customers had gone through over the course of the past year had underlined the importance of data protection.

“The market is experiencing significant growth as cyber attacks become more high profile, frequent and damaging, which is driving the increased requirement for specialist managed cyber security services,” he said.

“We have been particularly impressed with the depth of cyber security expertise demonstrated by Performanta, which is reflected by its Tier 1 customer base, including businesses with global operations across banking, aviation, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, public sector and blue-chip enterprises,” he added.