Naming a company is one of the most important decisions a business ever makes. It’s the first thing potential customers will see, and it’s what they’ll use to remember you. A good company name helps establish credibility and image.
Reciprocity: Our Humble Beginnings
When Reciprocity came into existence in 2009, the goal was to leverage technology services in exchange for improved processes and goodwill, effectively an exchange of things for mutual benefit … the definition of the word.
In 2013, as the company evolved into the compliance-focused GRC market, our platform called ZenGRC offered the ability for the end-user to deliver compliance-based audits quickly and repeatedly. This could still be perceived as reciprocity, as in the exchanging of technology and services for the good of compliance, albeit not incredibly obvious.
As the platform itself, ZenGRC, became more prevalent in the market, the true brand recognition was around the product, not the company, as it better described what the company did — providing “Zen” to GRC. The company name became a bit of an afterthought.
Evolution of the GRC Market
Over the past few years, the GRC market landscape has changed a lot from the early days of Reciprocity. As new players entered the space, the GRC market began to bifurcate, one part focusing on the rapid delivery of quick “check-the-box” compliance audits, and the other, on more strategic areas of understanding and quantifying risk, where compliance and audit are just one piece of a larger problem.
Faced with the normal adolescent growth stage of the company, we were forced to decide how to best accelerate growth, and after listening to our now diverse and expanded installed base, and reading the signs of the larger information security community, we made the decision to elevate our platform to focus on the real challenge for CISO’s and IT professional – how to observe, assess and remediate risk in the context of their business activities.
The ROAR Platform: A New Beginning
With a new mission in mind, we brought a new solution to market, the ROAR Platform, which we believe will be the next generation of GRC solutions … with the emphasis on the R – Risk. While ROAR provides powerful compliance and audit capability, the true power is in the way the platform consolidates that activity, as well as a wealth of information about threats, vulnerabilities and findings around risks to specific aspects of a company’s business.
Given this new expanded focus, it no longer made sense to call the company Reciprocity, as it did not easily map to the value and identity of our new mission, which is to convert risk to business advantage. We needed a new company name – one that would be unique, reflect our brand identity, be memorable, and like any good tech company, have a catchy name.
Time to See Risk Differently
When we look at what our ROAR Platform does, it is clear that it enables our users to see risk differently. Risk, in the context of business activities, provides a powerful view for CISOs and InfoSec professionals to be able to rapidly identify the threats and vulnerabilities associated with the related business assets. ROAR can then help customers implement the correct set of controls to mitigate that inherent risk and to map those controls directly to the set of compliance requirements and related audits that help determine how well the company is addressing the risk.
See risk differently?
View risk in the context of business activity?
Focus on the correct controls and assessments?
Those keywords, See, View, Focus, all are related to a specific way of looking at something — an optic, if you will. And suddenly it became clear that a great way to describe the company was that we produced risk-based optics — or more succinctly RiskOptics.
We wanted our name to be able to quickly convey the context of what we do. When people hear that name RiskOptics, it is clear at the outset that we are focused on seeing Risk, and in fact, seeing it in a way that is unique, powerful and actionable.
Welcome to the new RiskOptics!
Come see our new digital home at RiskOptics.com and for the next few months continue to read our valuable content here at Reciprocity.com.
For more details on this announcement and the next generation of the ROAR Platform, read this press release.