Forrester’s New Wave on Bot Management: Why it is valuable and how it can be further improved

Forrester recently released a report, The Forrester New Wave™: Bot Management, that evaluates the emerging bot management landscape. The report provides good depth and insight on the bot market and participating vendors, and is much needed in this growing cybersecurity segment. However, I’d like to take a further look at some of the points that should be included going forward: ease of deployment, customer loyalty and multi-platform support.

Being a strong performer is great kudos to a company that is one of the newest vendors in the bot management market. PerimeterX has been around just four years and shipping product for the last three. In these three years the product portfolio has expanded to include new detection and mitigation capabilities including mobile and API bot protection offerings. We’ve also continued to expand our behavioral profiling which empowers us to predict if a visitor is a bot before it is even served a page.

PerimeterX Bot Defender was the first of its kind to offer “bot protection as a service,” a complete SaaS-based offering, which removes the dependencies associated with a business’s infrastructure. Ease of deployment is a key decision criteria for customers and should be weighted appropriately in the Forrester analysis.

In fact, PerimeterX customers praise our ability to fit easily into their existing infrastructure. PerimeterX has led the industry in integrations with CDNs, load balancers, and middleware enabling companies to quickly integrate bot management capabilities without changing their stack. Clearly, PerimeterX has been doing this right. Other firms are following our lead and announcing plans for broad integration. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Another key consideration in the evaluation should be customer loyalty. Our customers strongly recognize the value of Bot Defender as evidenced by a customer retention rate of nearly 100 percent. In the SaaS world, best-in-class customer retention is 90 percent. We’re committed to continuing to beat this high measure.

While our customer retention is high, other firms are losing ground. Every day, we have customers raving about replacing their old solution with PerimeterX. According to a leading media firm, “The sentiment here is that we're happy with the move. Response times overall are faster, and we're seeing fewer reports of users being CAPTCHA'd when they aren't supposed to be...zero to be precise!" We appreciate the great feedback.

Last but not least, let’s talk more about support for multiple platforms: this should be a criterion in the evaluation. It felt odd to only concentrate on web attacks when mobile is a key driver to online activity for today’s digital businesses. In fact according to Statista nearly 50 percent of traffic to websites comes from mobile devices. As digital businesses connect to and grow their customer bases, mobile is the assumption.

Think about your habits: How often do you shop on your phone? Use it for social interactions? Scan media sites? And how does that compare to doing these activities via a desktop browser? Exactly my point! Mobile connectivity is key to how we live today and to digital business success. PerimeterX saw mobile as a key need in the bot management market. This market reality was not part of the evaluation criteria for the Forrester New Wave. Botnets are very intelligent and highly distributed. They attack your website and are also adept at attacking mobile applications. We believe that mobile protection is a key differentiator and should be considered in future evaluations. Today’s reality IS mobile. Protecting web, mobile and API traffic is paramount to customer success. All are addressed with PerimeterX Bot Defender™.

In addition to these factors, we continually add capabilities to the solution. And we’re keenly focused on our market approach: solidifying our messages, doubling down in verticals in which we are strong and refining our plans for geographic expansion. In short, we’re running fast at PerimeterX!

We have great respect for Forrester and the important, impartial role they play in evaluating vendors and providing guidance to customers. As experts in bot mitigation, we know what is important to our customers in this area. Some of these factors were missed in this report. To help customers, we suggest that they broaden their perspective on the reality of today’s digital business and listen more carefully to customers to understand their critical requirements. When they do, the true leader in bot management will be as clear to them as it is to our growing customer base.