Starting Over: A Blueprint for SOC Modernization

In 2018, I had just watched OpsRamp find its home at HPE. Six years of building a genuinely cloud-native IT operations platform - designed from the ground up to displace the legacy giants - and the outcome was good. I was proud of the team and what we had built.

But I had a specific, nagging observation that wouldn't let go.

The Data Divide

Enterprises were operating in three separate silos. IT teams under the CIO had their stack. Platform and engineering teams under the CTO had theirs. Security teams under the CISO had an entirely separate world. Each silo was generating enormous volumes of data. Nobody had a unified view of the enterprise's actual digital reality. The data existed. The intelligence did not.

I had learned from OpsRamp - and from the harder lessons of Velio before it - that building technology correctly requires two things above all: starting from the right foundation, and being willing to take the time to get that foundation right before building on top of it. There are no shortcuts to genuine intelligence. You either engineer the data properly or you get sophisticated noise.

A New Approach to SOC Modernization

So in 2018 I made a decision to approach SOC modernization differently. I would rebuild Netenrich from the ground up - security as the domain, data science as the method, intelligence as the only acceptable output. Not another detection tool. Not another alert system. An intelligence company that models the living digital reality of an enterprise and watches it continuously.

I called it the Resolution Intelligence Cloud. The name was deliberate. Resolution - not detection, not response, but the actual elimination of risk. Intelligence - not alerts, but understanding.

We built it without raising outside capital. After Velio, I had learned what capital dependency costs when conditions change. The bootstrapped discipline means you solve hard problems correctly rather than buying your way around them. It means the 200-plus customers we have today chose us on merit. Every one of them trusted us before we had the brand recognition or the analyst coverage. I carry that trust personally.

Six years in, the foundation is solid, the knowledge graph is growing smarter every hour across hundreds of customer environments, and GenAI and agents have arrived at exactly the right moment to give us buoyancy to accelerate our vision for SOC modernization.

The Blueprint Ahead

Over the next 25 weeks I want to share what this journey has taught us - about data science in security, about what genuine intelligence requires, and about where the industry is heading in the evolution of security operations. I am writing it because I think the conversation matters. Not as a vendor pitching a product. As a builder who has been at this for 22 years and has specific convictions about what works and what doesn't.

I hope it's worth your time. And I genuinely want to hear your perspective.

*Part of my ongoing series on data science and the future of security operations.*

 About the Author