Jody Brazil’s tech startup, DisruptOps, has sold to the company he co-founded nearly 20 years ago. As part of the acquisition, he also is taking on his former role as CEO at Overland Park-based FireMon LLC.
“I was not interested in stopping what I was doing,” Brazil told the Kansas City Business Journal. "I love building teams, I love solving problems, and FireMon represents a massive opportunity for an unmet need in the security operations space, so it’s an exciting challenge."
FireMon, which acquired DisruptOps for an undisclosed amount, specializes in network security policy management. It has thousands of enterprise customers at different stages of cloud adoption, which is where DisruptOps thrives. The Kansas City startup developed a cloud security operations platform to monitor, alert and respond to issues in real time. It breaks down barriers between development, security and operations teams.
“DisruptOps has helped our DevOps teams solve security problems before going into production, essentially adding a security engineer to each of our teams at a fraction of the cost,” Aaron Turner, chief security officer of DisruptOps customer Highside.io, said in a release. “The combination of FireMon's experience combined with DisruptOps' innovation will help us even more down the road.”
Brazil left FireMon in 2017 and co-founded DisruptOps in 2018. The idea for the startup was sparked by Brazil's longtime industry connections who own security research firm Securosis. Through their research, they discovered the challenges associated with security automation in the cloud.
After leaving FireMon, Brazil stayed in contact with FireMon’s team, including serial entrepreneur and Chairman Gary Fish, who’s an investor in DisruptOps and started working with Brazil in the late ‘90s. As the two caught up in July, they shared how things were going with their respective companies. When Fish said FireMon wanted to expand into cloud offerings, the conversation naturally evolved into a potential acquisition, Brazil said.
Brazil described the deal as an “awesome opportunity” for DisruptOps that allows it to target FireMon’s existing customer base. Even before the acquisition, DisruptOps was gaining solid traction and had attracted a wide-ranging customer base that includes startups, large enterprises and managed service providers. It also was garnering triple-digit annual revenue growth.
For Brazil, returning to FireMon feels comfortable, he said. A number of former colleagues still work at FireMon, and those he didn’t know have made him feel welcome.
With FireMon’s ongoing success, the first order of business is do no harm, Brazil said. FireMon, which employs roughly 300, is retaining DisruptOps’ team of 22. Brazil wants to create a cohesive team rallying around the company’s new mission: “We have the ability to deliver the security operations platform of the future, and more than anything else, that’s what gets me excited about this opportunity.”
