Cybersecurity Vendor Research Is Broken – Richard Stiennon Built a Fix
Cybersecurity Vendor Research Is Broken – Richard Stiennon Built a Fix
Publish Date: 2026-01-30 12:33:00
Source Domain: mitechnews.com
Security architects lose weeks buried in Google searches. Analysts build sprawling spreadsheets that are outdated almost as soon as they’re finished. Vendor shortlists are shaped less by market reality than by which sales teams get in front of buyers first.
That inefficiency isn’t just frustrating — it’s costly.
In this MITechNews interview, Richard Stiennon, founder of IT-Harvest, explains why most cybersecurity buying processes are structurally broken — and how he built a platform to fix it.
“The vendors know you don’t have time to find alternatives,” Stiennon said.
“So they pitch whatever they want, at whatever price they want.”
Two Decades of Cybersecurity Market Intelligence
Stiennon has tracked the cybersecurity industry for more than 20 years, long before today’s explosion of overlapping tools, categories, and buzzwords. For the past six years, that work has been published in an annual industry book cataloging the global cybersecurity market.
More recently, he transformed that research into a live intelligence platform: the IT-Harvest Dashboard.
Today, the dashboard tracks:
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Approximately 5,000 cybersecurity companies worldwide
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More than 12,000 individual security products
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Hundreds of functional categories based on what tools actually do — not how they’re marketed
Instead of static lists or rankings, IT-Harvest provides a continuously updated map of the cybersecurity ecosystem.
How the IT-Harvest Dashboard Works
As Stiennon explains in the interview, the dashboard is not a ranking system and not a pay-to-play analyst report.
It is a searchable, structured research platform that allows security leaders to:
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Search by security problem, not vendor name
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Instantly see all vendors operating in a category
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Identify overlap and redundancy across existing tools
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Discover alternatives before engaging sales teams
What once required weeks of internal labor can now be done in minutes.
