Duck, duck, jab: How Perch flies above the competition

As Vice President of Product and Strategy here at Perch, I often get asked questions about our competitive landscape. I never anticipated how hard it is to be objective when comparing ourselves to a competitor – of course, we’re better!

However, that isn’t ever the answer that my team, our prospects, or our customers are looking for. Typically, the differences cut across many areas, with 3 key ones being commitment, products and services, and support.

1. Commitment – What’s the fiscal and labor commitment needed to get the product running and keep it running?
2. Products and Services – What does the product do? What are the features, functionality, etc.? What, if any, services are offered with the product?
3. Support – What is the support experience like? Are they responsive to customer feature requests? Are the reps knowledgeable?

And for our channel partners, such as MSPs and MSSPs, there’s an extra (and equally important) key area:

1. Enablement – What does the vendor do to help enable our channel partners?

Commitment

Perch – Perch is a minimal commitment product for not only the pocketbook, without requiring long term commitments (you want month-to-month? Absolutely!), but also from an onboarding and maintenance standpoint. You can be up and running with many of Perch’s integrations and SIEM functionality inside of five minutes of signing up (including monitoring your Microsoft 365 or G Suite environment) and have a fully capable IDS deployed within an hour.

We find our customers appreciate our ability to onboard them and their clients quickly and without making them sell their soul for the privilege of running a world-class, co-managed threat detection platform.

What we’ve seen in the competition – In addition to charging for every integration or feature you want enabled, much of our competition attempts to lock you into multi-year escalating contracts where, in some cases, you’re paying double at the end of the term as you were paying at the beginning.

Products and Services

Perch – Perch brings together a world-class SaaS platform that delivers a fully customizable view into IDS and SIEM, while allowing our customers to bring their own endpoint solutions via our countless integrations. Our regulated and defense customers are particularly fond of our 24/7, US-based, SOC-as-a-Service based in Houston, Texas. Our threat research team is also staying on the bleeding-edge of what’s going on in the world of cyber threats, helping you sleep better at night.

We’ve also forged partnerships with growing security companies like CyberCNS for vulnerability management – we believe that you cannot attempt to be excellent at everything and remain competitive.

What we’ve seen in the competition – We see everything across the board in this arena. Often, we see those repurchasing expensive MSSP services or leveraging commercial, off-the-shelf software that has “bolt-on” management of a platform and “SOC” services that are usually provided by 3rd parties outside of the US. This creates a disjointed and inflexible stack that likely ceased being innovative the moment the vendor adopted the solution.

Support

Perch – Holy moly, do we have a rabid passion for providing world-class support through our implementation experts, product support team, and customer success team. Our support is driven by our commitment to excellence and our quirky culture. Perch is always evolving – remember the integrations I linked to above? Driven by our customer needs, we’ve published dozens of integrations with even more in the pipeline. Our customers and technical partners are typically stunned at how quickly we can turn integrations into the Perch platform to start delivering value in just a few short weeks vs. months or years. Our features, integrations, and functionality are driven by our customers’ involvement and our in-app roadmap and feature request section. These are just a couple of small examples of how we drive the support experience at Perch.

What we’ve seen in the competition – We hear all the time from customers of the competition when we are in the sales process: “The support has fallen off because they’re chasing an IPO,” or, “It was great when we were onboarding, but now we never hear from them.”

Enablement

Perch – We’re deeply committed to enabling our customers and channel partners. From continuing education sessions (hat tip to our Customer Success and Support teams), one-on-one enablement calls with our channel sales experts, and broad materials available in our partner portal, Perch delivers a rich enablement experience for our customers and partners to capitalize on.

What we’ve seen in the competition – We’ve seen many complaints inside the channel of the competition stealing clients and taking deals straight to the customer. This is extremely problematic and, in our opinion, highly unethical. Additionally, we’ve received feedback that the vendors don’t understand the channel or what is required to “land and expand.”

Riggs’ (slightly more than) 4 big questions

While you’re here, these are some questions to ask vendors as you’re evaluating potential solutions:

1. “Tell me about your software. What are you reselling, and what have you built in-house?”
2. “Where are your development, SOC, and support teams located? What are their hours?”
3. “What percentage of your alerts are handled by humans vs. Bots/AI/ML/etc.? What about escalations?”
4. “Define your SLA to me. Does your SLA define time to resolution or just time to begin an investigation? If the latter, what is the average time from investigation to alert close?”

If you’re interested in learning more about Perch and what we offer – you can find out more, right here.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on Twitter, LinkedIn or write in to hello@perchsecurity.com

Next: Perch bulletin: Ransomware targeting healthcare