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2010 Services Update

Rich November 11, 2009 No Comments

You can ignore this post if you aren’t interested in the for-pay side of Securosis (in other words, if you don’t want to give us any cash). I try not to put too much of the business side here in the blog feed, but we’re doing our 2010 planning and have made some changes to our services. Since we continue to grow, we needed to formalize things a little more than we have in the past. Being transparent, we don’t have to hide any of this. So if you are looking for some independent analysis, here’s what’s on our plate for 2010. For anything that’s public facing (whitepapers, webcasts, speaking) it has to comply with our objectivity standards (Totally Transparent Research). All of our services are open to users, vendors or the investment community, but I doubt any of you user types wants to sponsor a whitepaper. Retainer Programs: For 2010 we’ve split this into 2 levels – Basic and Premier. Basic is defined and priced based on the number of dedicated hours you think you might want per quarter (the lowest is 3), and includes unlimited “short” contact (quick emails/calls). Premier is our new program, priced at the level our largest retainer clients tended to go with ($7,500/quarter), but now includes unlimited hour-long calls, and up to 5 “extended inquiries” for deeper work. All retainer programs include discounts for all our other services, especially on-site days, which vary based on the tier of the retainer. Advisory Projects: These are custom scoped projects to meet specific objectives. Yes, pretty much just like consulting, even though we give it a fancy analyst name. On-Site Advisory Days: These are for on-site strategy work, although we can combine them with speaking engagements. White Papers/Published Research: We are formalizing our research agenda for the year and many of our papers are open for sponsorship. Sponsors cannot influence the content of the paper, but they also don’t have to pay if the paper ends up not meeting their needs. We do accept proposals for paper/research ideas, but if they don’t match our coverage agenda, or are biased by the nature of the topic, we can’t be involved. We do not do any ghostwriting. Right now we have a couple slots open on our database encryption and vulnerability assessment papers, and topics for 2010 include cloud computing (specifically a paper on data security in the cloud, and another on cloud-based security services), some data and application security topics we’re trying to narrow down, and additional work on patch management and Project Quant. There will be a bunch more, but we haven’t fully planned out our 2010 agenda yet. Webcasts/Speaking/Presentations: The usual – topics must be in our coverage areas and meet objectivity requirements, but we are otherwise pretty open on topics. Videocasts: Within the next few weeks we will be releasing our first in a series of short videos designed to supplement our other research. We’ve invested a lot of time and resources to be able to produce something a heck of a lot better than blurry talking heads, and some of these will be open for sponsorship. The first two should be ready within the next couple weeks – one on content analysis techniques, and the other on database activity monitoring collection techniques. They will average 5-15 minutes long, with laser focus on a specific topic. And that’s it. We have some other exciting stuff in the works (all for the user community), but nothing we’re ready to announce yet. Share:

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