Peter Laakkonen has been walking the Black Hat floor for twenty years. This year he walked it wearing a Noir Dove badge instead of a vendor one, and that shift…
Competitive positioning has a shelf life. SentinelOne proved this by accident. In 2020, it built its entire go-to-market around a single premise: CrowdStrike's capabilities, at a price the mid-market could…
Datadog reached $3.42 billion in revenue in FY2025 by solving a problem DevOps teams had been living with for years: too many signals, too many sources, too little context at…
There are now more than 5,000 cybersecurity vendors competing for CISO attention globally (CyberDB, 2026), and the majority describe themselves as a platform. The word was supposed to signal integration depth and strategic importance. Instead, 68% of CISOs now report that aggressive vendor marketing makes it nearly impossible to distinguish genuine innovation from noise. "Platform" became the noise. This article breaks down why the word backfires at the wrong stage, what two specific objections it triggers in enterprise buyers, and the sequencing logic that lets startups convey the same ambition without the credibility cost.