Salesforce Ventures Investment Values Tanium at $9 Billion

Tanium and Salesforce have come together in a strategic relationship to help solve one of today's most compelling and urgent problems: how does security manage a workforce that has migrated from in-house company desktops to remote personal devices. It is a problem that will not go away with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tanium and Salesforce have come together in a strategic relationship to help solve one of today's most compelling and urgent problems: how does security manage a workforce that has migrated from in-house company desktops to remote personal devices. It is a problem that will not go away with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new relationship involves a new funding round led by Salesforce Ventures, a VC firm that has previously invested in firms such as Zoom, Dropbox, Twilio and DocuSign. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed, but Tanium said it brings the company's valuation to around $9 billion. Given a funding round of $200 million in October 2018 raised the total investment at the time to nearly $800 million and valued the firm at $6.5 billion, it seems likely that the latest investment is of around $100 million.

The rapid and pandemic-forced switch from local to remote work, without time to do so in a controlled manner, has placed an enormous strain on company security staff -- many of whom are working remotely themselves. "In this new, digital, work-from-anywhere world, an explosion in unmanaged endpoints, escalating cyber-attacks and overwhelmed VPNs have stretched distributed IT support staff to the limit," said Tanium in a statement.

Orion Hindawi, co-founder and co-CEO at Tanium, explains further in a supporting Salesforce blog. "Many IT departments are struggling to manage the new IT reality: highly distributed, collaborative, remote and agile. They're finding that their legacy tools weren't designed for the environment they now face. With Tanium and Salesforce's strengths, we're uniquely positioned to deliver an end-to-end enterprise grade endpoint and service management platform that fits perfectly with our customers' new, work-from-anywhere world."

The partnership between the firms is expected to produce new products by November 2020. From Tanium's viewpoint, joint customers will be able to reliably manage assets, proactively remediate incidents, improve decision making with real-time, accurate and comprehensive endpoint data, and improve productivity for employees and help-desk engineers.

Meanwhile, Salesforce says the partnership will help employees access support from anywhere across devices and channels, including AI-powered bots and mobile self-service sites; maximize IT productivity with integrated help desk, asset management and custom workflows; and accelerate incident resolution by empowering IT with a complete view of every employee coupled with AI-powered productivity tools to drive proactive resolution.

"With the shift to an all-digital, remote workforce where employees are using personal internet connections to connect to company networks, it’s even more critical that IT can ensure employee devices are secure, patched, updated and compliant," said Sarah Franklin, EVP and GM, Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange at Salesforce. "Companies need to invest in the right IT infrastructure to ensure their technology assets are stable and secure. I’m excited to be partnering with Tanium to build an employee service solution that will accelerate IT automation and empower employees to do their best work."

Related: Zoom Appoints Former Salesforce Security Executive as CISO 

Related: Faulty Database Script Exposed Salesforce Data to Wrong Users 

Related: UK's 1E Challenges Tanium With New Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) Tool 

Related: Magecart Skimmers Found on Salesforce's Heroku Platform 

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Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.

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