Absolute Software Corporation (Absolute) provides a cloud-based platform that enables the management and security of computing devices, applications, and data for various organizations worldwide.
Absolute is a leading provider of self-healing endpoint and secure access solutions, delivering truly resilient Zero Trust for distributed workforces. Absolute is the only endpoint platform embedded in more than half a billion devices, offering a permanent digital connection that intelligently and dyna...
Absolute Software Corporation (Absolute) provides a cloud-based platform that enables the management and security of computing devices, applications, and data for various organizations worldwide.
Absolute is a leading provider of self-healing endpoint and secure access solutions, delivering truly resilient Zero Trust for distributed workforces. Absolute is the only endpoint platform embedded in more than half a billion devices, offering a permanent digital connection that intelligently and dynamically applies visibility, control and self-healing capabilities to endpoints, applications, and network connections - helping customers to strengthen cyber resilience against the escalating threat of ransomware and malicious attacks. Trusted by more than 17,000 customers, G2 recognized Absolute as a leader for the tenth consecutive quarter in the Summer 2022 Grid Report for Endpoint Management and as a high performer in the G2 Grid Report for Zero Trust Networking.
The Absolute Platform and Technology
One of the essential platform components is the patented Persistence technology, which assures an always-on connection to the endpoint and allows for an always-on tunnel or network session. Furthermore, the company’s self-healing client technology for Windows is capable of automatically repairing or reinstalling itself if it is tampered with, accidentally removed, or otherwise stops working.
The Secure Endpoint product portfolio enables IT and security personnel to monitor and address laptop computers' problems and ensures the laptops and their mission-critical applications to self-heal. This strengthens a company’s security posture, while helping IT maintain compliance. Absolute Visibility collects data about the endpoints' location, security posture, and hardware/software inventory. It provides analysis of software and hardware utilization and identifies potential failure points and suspicious use patterns. Absolute Control adds to these capabilities to control endpoints over the internet, allowing for remote file deletion and data wipe, freezing devices on demand when at-risk, as well as establishing geo-fences and alerts. Absolute Resilience adds further capabilities to secure endpoints from threats and vulnerabilities, and to respond to security breaches and incidents. It ensures that devices are self-aware of the environment and resilient to changes, e.g., by self-healing mission-critical applications. The catalogue of applications that can be monitored to determine if their integrity has been impeded due to decay, software collision, misconfiguration, or malicious actions and subsequently automatically self-heals (i.e., repairs or re-installs, as needed), has grown to 60 independent applications (as of June 30, 2022).
The company added Absolute Ransomware Response in April 2022 to provide capabilities and services to assess an organization's ransomware preparedness and cyber hygiene across endpoints; ensure mission-critical security applications, such as anti-malware and device management tools remain healthy and capable of self-healing; and expedite the quarantine and recovery of endpoints if a ransomware attack occurs.
The Secure Access product portfolio provides reliable network connectivity for users to gain secure access to critical resources in the public cloud, private data centers, or on-premises. These products allow users to transition from traditional secure remote access technologies to a Zero Trust approach, without affecting productivity or admin controls. Absolute VPN (Virtual Private Network) provides security and confidentiality for data in motion by means of encryption and access controls. It also offers benefits to the end user, such as persisting tunnel and network sessions and optimizing streaming video and audio. Absolute ZTNA provides a software-defined perimeter via Zero Trust Network Access, creating a context-based, logical access boundary around an application or set of applications – wherever they are hosted. It shields applications from the internet, making them invisible to unauthorized users. Access policies are enforced at the endpoint, avoiding latency and any data transgression. Absolute Insights for Network offers diagnostic and experience monitoring capabilities across endpoints and network, allowing organizations to pro-actively monitor, investigate, and remediate end user performance issues quickly and at scale, even on networks that are not company-owned or managed.
Since October 2021, the company’s Secure Access portfolio has been enabled with the self-healing power it is known for in its Endpoint Resilience products.
In November 2021, Absolute launched a new service targeting Independent Software Vendors, called APaaS, enabling ISVs to embed the company’s Application Persistence capabilities into their security and business applications – ensuring those applications stay installed, healthy, and working across their entire customer base. This new route to market creates an additional monetization opportunity for the company’s solutions.
Business Model
Absolute’s Secure Endpoint products are delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, where customers access the company’s service through the cloud-based Absolute Console. The company sells its products to end customers most often under a term license model in which customers acquire subscriptions to its cloud-based software services for a specified term, typically ranging from one to five years.
The majority of these subscriptions are fully invoiced up-front for the entire licensed term and are non-refundable. The company refers to its total invoiced sales in a period as its total billings. During Q4 F2022, the prepaid term of the company’s billings averaged approximately 17 months (based on the ratio of the total amount invoiced over the annualized recurring revenue of the associated billings). The company also offers enterprise license (EL) and site license (SL) models, which provide customers with the option to license its software for multiple years on either a fully pre-paid basis or with an annual payment at the start of each contract year.
Absolute’s Secure Access solutions are offered through on-premises perpetual licenses, term-based subscription licenses, or cloud-based subscriptions. The company is in the process of two important expansions that it will further support the scalability of this product line. The company is beginning to move the customer base from a historical software license and maintenance model to recurring subscription arrangements; and transitioning the product delivery to the cloud from a historically on-premises installation.
Business and Growth Strategy
The company’s acquisition of NetMotion positions Absolute to enable a reliable, resilient work from anywhere experience by ensuring maximum security and uncompromised productivity while enforcing Zero Trust principles. The company’s combined portfolio will allow customers to efficiently transition to the modern security expectations of Zero Trust and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), while enhancing their security and overall compliance posture.
The company’s go-to-market focus is centered on buyers across several core verticals, including government, healthcare, education, and public safety, as well as fast-growing segments, such as financial, legal and professional consulting firms.
The business meets the needs of both the IT and security buyer, providing resilient Zero Trust solutions for the modern CIO and CISO in their pursuit to protect their organizations. Absolute enjoys a relationship with the partner community to engage with its customer ecosystem of over 1,100 partners, including several global carriers and unique integrations with 28 leading PC OEMs. The company also focuses on growth internationally, and has a physical presence across North America, as well as in the United Kingdom, Vietnam, Germany, Australia, Japan, and Latin America.
The key elements of the company’s strategy include strengthening Absolute’s overall competitive position with unique capabilities and supporting new computing strategies needed in the emerging work from anywhere era; establishing a competitive position in the high-growth Zero Trust and ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) markets with unique coverage, ranging from firmware to the network; securing a position in mobile with an enterprise-grade VPN offering and enabling customers to transition to more modern security expectations of Zero Trust and SASE; delivering to IT a complete view into the remote and hybrid worker with the ability to collect in-demand data, allowing organizations to more quickly respond to users’ needs, improve compliance, and strengthen security posture; providing Absolute with revenue diversity that the company helps de-risk and drive its long-term growth profile; and providing additional product development capabilities in complementary fields, with teams based primarily in Seattle, the U.S.A. and Victoria, Canada.
NetMotion Acquisition
On July 1, 2021, the company completed the acquisition of 100% of the shares of NetMotion Software, Inc. (NetMotion), a leading provider of connectivity and security solutions.
NetMotion is a SASE business supporting over 3,000 organizations, combining high performance enterprise VPN, ZTNA, and DEM on a unified platform for enterprises with a distributed workforce. NetMotion brings a network-centric security platform with the ability to maintain a resilient connection across networks. This allows users to securely access organizational resources on-premises or in the cloud while moving through various locations, without the need to reconnect or re-authenticate.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a security framework that converts security and network connectivity technologies into a single cloud delivered platform to enable secure and fast cloud transformation. SASE’s convergence of networking and network security is designed to meet the challenges presented by digital business transformation, edge computing, and workforce mobility.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is a product or service that creates an identity- and context-based, logical access boundary around an application or set of applications. The applications are hidden from discovery, and access is restricted via a trust broker to a set of named entities. The broker verifies the identity, context, and policy adherence of the specified participants before allowing access and prohibits lateral movement elsewhere in the network. This removes application assets from public visibility and significantly reduces the surface area for attack. ZTNA operates on a ‘deny by default’ basis, designed to keep unwanted users or bad actors from accessing sensitive enterprise resources.
DEM is used to discover, track, and optimize web-based resources and the end-user experience. These tools monitor traffic, user behaviour, and a number of additional factors to help businesses understand their products’ performance and usability.
Routes to Market
The company has several routes to market, which are grounded in its ‘land and expand’ strategy, where it seeks to grow its presence within a customer’s IT and security environments over time.
PC OEMs
During the selling process, the company typically co-engages with its PC OEM partners, often also in conjunction with resellers and distribution partners. Orders are often placed from the company’s end user customers to its partners, who then place orders directly with Absolute. To drive demand, the company operates a channel support team with responsibility for cultivating go-to-market initiatives with its channel partners and driving new customer acquisition campaigns.
Direct
The company’s direct sales force is responsible for targeting new customers, solution design, upselling and expanding within existing accounts, and relationship management with the company’s end customers. Commonly, a customer’s initial purchase of the company’s solutions will be made in conjunction with the purchase of new endpoint devices and will represent a small portion of the overall license opportunity within that customer’s environment.
Other Channel Partners
In addition to its strategic partnerships with PC OEMs, Absolute engages with and sells through a variety of other indirect channel partners, including resellers, distributors, and managed IT service providers (MSPs) around the world. These partners typically have direct relationships with existing and potential customers, offering opportunities for Absolute to acquire new customers.
Partner Ecosystem
The company’s partner ecosystem is an essential component of its business strategy. The company’s key partners are PC OEMs who are both key collaborative technology partners and key distribution and reseller partners. The company also has a robust and growing network of other partners, such as distributors, resellers, MSPs and ISVs. As an increasing number of end customers are relying on outsourced expertise to manage IT for and secure their organizations, it is seeing growth in its MSP and Managed Security Service Provider ecosystem that leverage Absolute to provide endpoint services to their customers. In addition, the company partners with ISVs to enable health monitoring and resiliency of the ISVs’ solutions with the Absolute Persistence technology.
The company is continually enhancing and expanding its PC OEM relationships from both the technology and go-to-market perspectives in order to drive value for them. The company’s PC OEM partners have adopted its Persistence technology as a standard and have embedded it in the firmware of their laptop, desktop, and/or tablet devices. This is an important collaboration for the company as the embedded support enhances the persistence (the ability to survive unauthorized or unintentional removal attempts) of its software, which is a key differentiator for it. The company’s Persistence technology is normally shipped in a dormant state with the device and activated after the customer purchases the company’s service and installs the Absolute software agent.
Seasonality
Given the annual budget approval process of many of the company’s customers, it sees seasonal patterns in its business. Historically, a higher concentration of billings has occurred in the fourth quarter of each fiscal year, due primarily to higher activity in the North American education sector during this quarter (year ended June 30, 2022).
Sales and Marketing
The company’s primary go-to-market strategies are to generate demand for new sales opportunities, including through its PC OEM partners and to retain and expand with its existing customers. In addition, the company generates sales and facilitates renewals via its other distribution channels, such as resellers, distributors, MSPs, and integrators. The company’s sales and marketing teams work closely with its channel partners to identify and close opportunities in an effort to expand its market penetration and opportunity pipeline. These teams’ responsibilities include strategic technology and sales program development with PC OEM partners and other software vendors, logistics management, training, event coordination, advertising and special promotions, and day-to-day in-field sales cycle management with end customers.
The company’s marketing team works cross-functionally to build demand and preference for Absolute’s security solutions, with the aim of appealing to new customers, retaining existing customers, and continuously developing brand awareness. In addition, the company’s communications team is dedicated to generating awareness for and showcasing Absolute across relevant business, trade, and financial media coverage and industry reports.
Product Development and Operations
Customers and Customer Experience
The company has a diversified customer base, with over 17,000 customers globally (as of June 30, 2022). The company’s end customers include businesses of various sizes and industries, healthcare organizations, educational institutions, governmental agencies, and individual consumers.
The company’s success is also attributable to its relentless focus on its customers’ experience and journey with Absolute. The company’s ‘Customer Experience’ organization (including Customer Success, Professional Services, Investigations, Support & Education, and Customer Programs) integrates Absolute’s customer delivery functions under a common umbrella. These teams are responsible for curating the Absolute customer journey, capturing the voice of the customer, and creating programs to support a robust subscription base of engaged, loyal, and growing customers.
The company offers its customers a comprehensive onboarding experience, as well as product training, ongoing health check services, and premium support. The company’s Absolute Assist professional service offering provides customers with a dedicated technical account manager, and its Absolute Manage professional service offering is a staff augmentation offering designed to extend its customers’ IT teams. The company also provides a wide range of product customization and integration capabilities.
Intellectual Property
The company relies on a combination of patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, confidentiality procedures, contractual provisions, and other measures to protect its proprietary information and technology. As of June 30, 2022, Absolute had a global portfolio of 178 issued patents and 24 patent applications in process. These patents cover a broad range of software and communication technologies and have varying expiry dates.
Foreign Operations
Absolute has historically derived the majority of its revenues from outside of Canada. The United States is both Absolute’s largest market and source of revenue by geographic area. Europe and other international regions have also provided revenue growth, and Absolute continues to strategically invest for revenue growth in certain emerging markets outside of North America. In addition, Absolute maintains a substantial operation in Vietnam, which is primarily consisted of engineering and other technical staff.
Significant Events
In August 2021, the company announced the release of the Absolute DataExplorer tool, a unique and flexible endpoint data exploration tool, enabling organizations to align Absolute’s expansive, on-demand endpoint telemetry with their evolving business requirements.
In November 2021, the company announced the launch of Absolute Application Persistence-as-a-Service (APaaS), empowering Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and system manufacturers to leverage Absolute’s firmware-embedded, self-healing device connection to strengthen the health and resiliency of their mission-critical applications.
In February 2022, the company’s Secure Access product (NetMotion Mobility 12.14) achieved Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, the highest certification level recognized internationally under the Common Criteria program for software products. Absolute is the only network solutions provider to achieve this certification across Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows for its Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology.
In February 2022, the company successfully completed the System and Organization Controls (SOC 2) Type I audit for its Secure Access cloud platform.
In March 2022, the company launched Absolute Insights for Endpoints and Networks – enabling organizations to track and analyze critical performance metrics spanning endpoints, users, applications, and network connections.
In March 2022, the company appointed the Nuvias Group as distributor in the DACH region, expanding on previous distribution agreements in the U.K. and Benelux.
In March 2022, the company was recognized by CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, with a 5-star rating in its 2022 Partner Program Guide for the second consecutive year. The 5-star rating is awarded to select vendors that help push growth and positive change through their partner programs.
In Q4 2022, the company reached 13.6 million active endpoints across its global customer base.
In Q3 2022, the company grew its catalogue of Application Persistence titles by 81% year over year.
In June 2022, the company announced a partnership with BlackBerry to enable joint customers to augment CylancePROTECT with Absolute’s Application Persistence capabilities.
In July 2021, the company completed the acquisition of NetMotion.
In February 2022, the company was named to G2’s 2022 Best Software Awards for Best Security Products list in the Endpoint Security category – driven by continued customer satisfaction and significant market presence.
In April 2022, the company launched operations in Australia and New Zealand, as well as expanded operations across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as a result of continued demand for its intelligent, self-healing security solutions.
In May 2022, the company was featured as a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
Trademarks
ABSOLUTE, ABSOLUTE SOFTWARE, the ABSOLUTE logo, PERSISTENCE, APPLICATION PERSISTENCE, ABSOLUTE RESILIENCE, ENDPOINT RESILIENCE, ABSOLUTE REACH, ABSOLUTE CONTROL, SELF-HEALING ENDPOINT, and NETMOTION are trademarks of the company (or its subsidiaries) in Canada, the United States, and/or other jurisdictions.
Competition
For its Secure Access solutions (added via the NetMotion acquisition), competitors and potential competitors include:
Independent IT security vendors, such as Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.; Citrix Systems, Inc; F5 Networks, Inc.; Fortinet, Inc.; Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Pulse Secure, LLC (acquired by Ivanti); Symantec Corporation; and Zscaler, Inc., which offer a broad mix of network and endpoint security products.
Large networking vendors, such as Cisco Systems, Inc. and Juniper Networks, Inc., which offer security appliances and incorporate security capabilities in their networking products.
History
Absolute Software Corporation was founded in 1993. The company was incorporated in 1993.
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