Fusion is designed to be sold be Recorded Future and its channel alongside the company’s existing solutions portfolio.

Threat intelligence vendor Recorded Future has made a significant extension to their solutions portfolio with the announcement of their Fusion Software-as-a-Service offering.

Privately held Recorded Future has been in business since 2009. Based in Boston, their founders are a combination of Swedes and Swedish-Americans who earlier founded a company that was acquired by TIBCO.

“This time, they decided to focus on unstructured text, and what has become known as cybersecurity,” said Matt Kodama, VP of Product Management and Product Strategy at Recorded Future. “While things have since changed dramatically, this used to be an area that was regarded as something for the feds. We established ourselves in the space and now call ourselves The threat intelligence company.”

Kodama said that this market was focused around services when Recorded Future first came into it.

“Doing it that way didn’t scale well, especially because there wasn’t enough talent in cybersecurity,” he said. “We came in as software and data people and wanted to solve this with compute, to go through a ton of raw data and look at what is risky. Now, we supply data to most of the risk management Sis.”

Recorded Future developed a clientele of customers whose common attribute was that they were very big companies.

“It included banks, conglomerates and companies in multiple industries, with their size rather than the vertical being the key factor,” Kodama said. “These are companies who care about their brand, and who care about our ability to deliver timely threat intelligence information. It’s a SaaS product, so if they want to evaluate, they can be using it the next day. They don’t have to rack it, or load it up with data.”

Despite their position in the market, Recorded Future is not widely known in the channel, because their channel is comparatively recent.

“We started as a sophisticated high touch sales product – a direct product,” Kodama said. “Only in the last few years have we begun developing a channel, which includes major security solution providers like Optiv and Guidepoint. We’ve matured into that. We have the threat data, and that’s where the fit is. However the security market is a channel market. To scale it, we have to work effectively with the channel.”

Kodama said that they provide a key differentiator for security solution providers.

“Everyone runs AV and firewall – but not many have a threat intelligence practice,” he said.

Fusion extends this differentiation by providing analysis of a broader set of both open and closed feeds and internal risk lists from a centralized single pane of glass perspective.  Fusion also introduces a level of customization that did not previously exist in Recorded Future solutions.

“Until Fusion, we collected data and we put it together for customers,” Kodama said. “They  configured our product to define questions that they had. With Fusion, we introduce a read-and-write capability, that lets them integrate their own threat knowledge with all of our threat knowledge, to get the current best picture. It’s not a just a one-way street any more, where we give them information based on their questions.

“From a channel standpoint, the value here is that it lets them more precisely target the threat data we have to the needs they know their clients have,” Kodama added.

Kodama said that another important new addition in Fusion involves analysis of Internet chatter impinging on risk.

“You can get important information about risk level from this kind of chatter on underground sites about the buying of data,” Kodama said. “This can affect the customer’s decisions about when to patch. For instance, within days of the Equifax breach being disclosed, there was a ton of chatter on Chinese language underground sites. It’s a good indicator of break-ins involving specific vulnerabilities, which allows the customer to put mitigations in place to defend against additional intrusion.”

Recorded Future Fusion will be generally available both through the company and its partner network in calendar Q2. It will be sold as a supplement to their existing solution offerings.

“This is an additional product that goes with ones we already have,” Kodama said. “It’s not a standalone.’