CASE STUDY: NS1

When you’re driving from point A to point B, the shortest route may not always be the fastest. That’s because you need to take multiple factors into consideration: traffic congestion, accidents, road conditions, and construction. The same thing applies when you’re looking at the internet’s traffic – sending users to the closest geographic data center doesn’t always make sense.

The problem is that while the internet has rapidly evolved, the underlying DNS, DHCP, and IPAM technology – the “GPS” that routes the internet’s traffic – hadn’t really changed much since the 1980s. That is, until NS1 came onto the scene.

Founded in 2013 by Kris Beevers, Jonathan Sullivan, and Alex Vayl, NS1 took a radically different approach to traffic steering – infusing intelligence and automation into the modern application and access networking stack. In the early days, the company focused on customers in the ad tech space – agile companies with cloud native users. However, within a few short years, soon they were seeing business from the biggest of the big – companies like DropBox, LinkedIn, and Salesforce.

The search for more than just an investor

With business rapidly growing, when NS1 went in search of Series C funding in 2019, money wasn’t their main focus. Instead, they were looking for strategic partners to elevate their go-to-market strategy. They needed a partner with global access and scale. According to CEO Kris Beevers, “Cisco was our first call.”

From the Cisco perspective, NS1 was a no-brainer investment. Not only was Prasad Parthasarathi, Head of Cisco’s Security Investment and M&A, impressed by NS1’s rapid growth, but he also recognized that NS1’s DNS technology perfectly complemented Cisco’s own DNS solution. “This was an opportunity to bring together two best-in-class technologies: Cisco Umbrella on the access and endpoint security side and NS1 on the application and traffic side.”

Unlike any other investor

After Cisco Investments commits to an investment, the first step is to partner the portfolio company with their dedicated Relationship Manager – the person who will champion the company to the Cisco ecosystem and develop a personalized acceleration plan to meet the company’s goals. For NS1, this was Neetta Shetty, Security Portfolio Development Lead at Cisco Investments. According to Kris, “Even before closing on the investment, we realized it was a materially different relationship than we’ve had from other investors. Right away, Neetta met with our team to talk through our priorities and to establish a process that worked in both directions.” As part of the acceleration plan, Cisco and NS1 focused on 3 key themes: building product integrations, scaling joint go-to-market, and elevating NS1’s brand and presence.

Magnifying the go-to-market

Within only 3 months of the investment, NS1 was already plugged into the Cisco Investments Village at Cisco Live Barcelona, Cisco’s largest event for European customers. There, the entire Portfolio Development team at Cisco Investments got to work – funneling high-priority customers, Cisco leadership, and partner executives to meet NS1. In the span of three days, Cisco had:

• Connected NS1 with 170 Sales/Sales Engineers from over 50 Cisco Security partners throughout EMEA

• Identified over 20 target partners — reducing partner recruitment time by 3 months

• Validated NS1 to the partner community as a strategic technology important to the entire Cisco ecosystem

• Scheduled five follow-up Partner Review Sessions

In total, NS1 made 500+ EMEA contacts from over 300 top-tier customers from the banking, healthcare, aviation, petrochemical, energy, communications, food industries, and more. From those, 40 sales discovery opportunities were identified. According to Kris, “It was by far the most impactful field event that we've ever done.”

Support from the top

Cisco Live Barcelona was just the beginning for NS1’s relationship with Cisco. Over the following months, Kris saw a rapid acceleration of the joint pipeline driven by executive sponsorship at the top levels of the Global Security Sales Organization. “From a field engagement perspective, we’ve found the security sales team – and really all of Cisco – to be deeply receptive to engagements and conversations. We’re working together to figure out how to lift each other’s businesses.”

After months of partnership, Cisco and NS1’s leadership were able to check one more milestone off the original acceleration plan: adding NS1 to Cisco’s Global Price List. Now, with Cisco sellers also being compensated for selling NS1 products, NS1’s sales organization has multiplied exponentially.

Looking at the progress so far, Kris said, “Cisco has exceeded every expectation. Their investment and partnership stand apart.”