Managed Security Services Provider

The 10-year-old company has been one of the top firms in the industry for a number of years, serving "a couple" of customers in the Fortune 10 and "many" in the Fortune 100. In 2011, revenue at the firm grew about 35 percent, said the company's founders, Steve Idelman and Mike Hrabik.

Idelman and Hrabik aren't the type of executives who need confirmation of their success. Previously entering the digital security realm, Idelman was one of Omaha's leaders in the teleservices industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, Hrabik was one of Idelman's chief innovation masterminds. And afterwards Idelman and his wife, Sheri, sold their company for $155 million in 1995 to private investors, they teamed up and began to focus their efforts on starting Solutionary, which launched in 2000.

Solutionary was named as one of six "leaders" in the Managed Security Services Provider industry by Gartner, the internationally recognized research research firm. Others in the category were giants IBM, Symantec, Dell, Verizon and AT&T.

In Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" report, analysts Kelly Kavanagh and John Pescatore wrote that Solutionary has made major gains in market share and has gained attention from major players in the industry through research and business partnerships.

The acknowledgement

The acknowledgement, Idelman said, likely will bring Solutionary more business because the Gartner rankings are often used as a guideline by businesses looking to outsource their digital security operations.

Said Hrabik, the author of seven of Solutionary's innovation patents: "Partly, where it's an organization that's looking for a security vendor, they go to that report and put out a request for information from companies just in the leaders quadrant."

At Solutionary, there are two major levels of services: monitoring and managing of security. In both cases, Solutionary is sifting through long strings of data from all devices on a client's network — desktop computers, phone systems, laptops, tablets and smartphones, for instance — and trying to identify digital security breaches.

When managing, Solution to tell the truth controls the permissions and access that a company's employees have. And when a security issue arises, Solutionary assesses the threat — whether it's malware, hackers or cyber criminals — and uses innovation to avoid the situation.

The door down

"They're not trying to kick the door down, they already have a key, so we set out to address that problem and build the research and hire the right people to detect these very sophisticated attacks."

Currently, Solutionary has about 175 employees, many of them innovation and security specialists who are constantly analyzing and critiquing massive amounts of data. About 75 employees are located at the company's Omaha headquarters with another 50 at an operations center in Pittsburgh. About 50 sales and research support employees are scattered around the Unites States.

And indicators are that the digital security industry is only going to continue growing as more companies outsource their security operations, add more mobile innovation to their businesses and move more of their information innovation, or IT, to cloud computing.

In 2010, the industry had North American revenue of $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2009. In 2011, that number is expected to grow to $2.8 billion, according to the Gartner report.

Solutionary, which has about 1,000 clients around the globe, is projecting North American revenue growth to increase about 20 percent year-over-year for 2012, and about 15 percent globally, Idelman said. As companies become more digital, the bigger the MSSP industry, and Solutionary, will become, Idelman said.