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The Dectar Story Continues
Through funding and contributions from a variety of investors – institutional, venture capital firms, and private funds – Dectar has managed to grow through the difficult, challenging initial start-up phase towards a more structured scale-up.
The development of an organization, from the initial stages with a handful of people on board, a solid project and their ambitions only, into a structured organization that can serve prospects and targets alike, is no easy task.
The main focus at the beginning of the next phase was pivoting around the product’s development, the ground-breaking ACSIA XDR Plus, taking the XDR (Extended Detection and Response) capabilities to the next level via the ACSIA core of its product, an acronym that stands for “Automated Cyber Security Intelligence Application”.
Moving Forward from Prototyping to Marketable Product
Considering the acquired funding from the likes of Enterprise Ireland first and Cysero later enabled the organization to develop further, the first investments were on product development’s capabilities and its related resources.
The goal was to develop a marketable product that would constitute a real breakthrough in terms of prevention and prediction, versus the usual XDR, that’s limited to a post-attack reaction.
Through several iterations of the product’s development, Dectar put together a marketable product that could help institutions and organizations of different sizes: that was a mantra from the beginning, as its CEO Stefan Umit Uygur wanted to practice what he preached for years, hence Dectar’s cybersecurity solutions had and have to be adaptable, when it comes to their configurations, to different needs and companies’ sizes.
Growing Pains and Helping The Team Grow
Growing pains were also part of the process: with an ever evolving organizational structure, the Senior Management Team all had to be committed to grow the company and nurture talent organically.
By philosophy, Dectar has been a fully remote company from its inception and everyone’s commitment to team building, tight collaboration and constant communication was absolutely necessary.
Some had to adapt to this type of set-up, some others have practiced remote working and online collaboration for years already, some others just had little experience with it.
The Senior Management Team had to provide the employees with the right level of ownership, autonomy, accountability, whilst trying to make sure that supervision could truly deliver for the company and help the employees deliver.
There is no shortcut for making it work: it takes relentless communication, understanding, team building and technology, too. In fact, the right software and tools had to be sourced and utilized to get the job done effectively.
The Org Chart Gets a Boost
With the ACSIA XDR Plus solution on track and whilst growing resources in the department of product’s development helped propel the core of Dectar forward, the need for structure and an adaptable scale-up organization became more and more necessary.
Human Resources and people management had to be added, for the growing ranks needed proper induction and management that the Senior Management Team alone could not always provide or fully satisfy.
And the commercial side of the Dectar business also had to be created: in the end, the spectacular cybersecurity solution still had to be communicated, marketed and sold. Hence, the first Salespeople joined the company, initially leveraging their own past networks and weighing in the level of interest of their prospects and targets in the new ACSIA XDR Plus solution.
Some advisors, also, came aboard in order to provide the Senior Management Team with advice and useful contacts among their network, in order to help market the company’s solutions and nurture the interest in a ground-breaking European organization such as Dectar.