Leading Panther's Next Chapter as CTO
To our customers, investors, partners, and team,
Today, I’m pleased to announce a transition in my role at Panther from CEO to CTO to lead our technical team. With this transition comes the promotion of Will Lowe from COO to CEO. I have worked closely alongside Will for the past 4 years, and he has been a key leader in the company’s commercial success. I’m confident that his intense customer focus, go-to-market background, and comprehensive understanding of our business will take Panther to the next level, and I’m thrilled to continue working alongside him and our technical leadership as Panther’s CTO.
Building Panther over the past 5.5 years has been an incredible journey, and I’m very proud of our team's work in serving each customer who trusts us as their SIEM partner. My transition to CTO allows me to focus 100% of my time and attention on working closely with our customers, security leaders, and internal teams to deliver the best security outcomes via our product.
I started Panther because there was a missing link between SIEMs and the code-driven practices that produce consistent, reliable results. The industry now calls this “Detection Engineering,” which Detection and Response leaders frequently discuss on our podcast, Detection-at-Scale. Detection Engineering is an important practice because it encourages reliability, scalability, automation of repetitive, manual tasks, continuous improvement, and measurement toward objectives. This approach was exemplified by the popularity of tools like ElastAlert, StreamAlert, and Sigma, where SIEM rules could be declared and managed in code.
Panther was heavily inspired by my time as a practitioner at Airbnb and Yahoo, where conventional tools failed due to our scale, cost, or staffing limitations. I believe we have an opportunity to continue investing in detection engineering themes in SIEM for the benefit of those who would not attach “engineer” to their title. While not all security teams write code, they each have the shared desire to automate, continually improve, and protect their organization from increasingly sophisticated threats.
Security has evolved since Panther started in 2018, and teams have embraced the latest market trends of taking a data lake-driven approach, prioritizing cost savings, and looking for team optimizations with LLMs. They also want to build security monitoring programs incorporating their unique business logic, current vulnerabilities, and historical context to dictate risk and improve signal creation and response. Despite the market shifts and technological evolution, we still desire to achieve the same outcomes: Detect the signs of a breach, react as quickly as possible, and prevent it next time.
This year, Panther is bringing the utility of code-driven detection to a broader audience while retaining the sophistication that our early adopters loved. Additionally, we are up-leveling our correlation, analytics, and visualization capabilities to feel more familiar with incumbent tooling while throwing some AI magic into the mix. Our job isn’t done until our customer’s security programs continuously improve, proven by data and metrics. I’m grateful, energized, and excited for this next chapter, and I look forward to continuing to share learnings, insights, and updates on this blog and on our podcast. Thank you!