Happy 2016! As always, the first thing I want to do is say thank you to our awesome customers without whom DomainTools would not exist. We deeply appreciate our longtime customers who renewed with us in 2015 as well as our hundreds of new customers who signed up with DomainTools this past year. We hope to always exceed your expectations, both with our products and with our responsiveness. And we wish you every success in the new year.
I look at our company in four quadrants: Data, Products, Customers and Team.
Data
In 2015 we continued to invest in sourcing and provisioning the industry’s best domain and DNS data into our products. We ended the year with just under 300 million known domains in DNS, exceeding 90% coverage in most of the top ccTLD name spaces. We fully parse all new whois records for these domains, adding to our store of over 10 billion historic whois records going back 15 years. We made strides in the IP Address whois data space, moved up the URL into the hostname data space, and built industrial strength systems to collect other DNS data types directly adjacent to our market leading whois and A Record data sets. Which brings me to…
Product
If you haven’t heard about Iris Investigate yet then I’m not doing my job very well. We are very excited about this revolutionary new platform for doing threat intelligence investigations and articulating through DomainTools’ expanding data sets. It is the foundation for a bold roadmap we have for DNS-based threat intelligence in 2016 and beyond. If you’ve used Iris Investigate, you may have seen our beta Domain Reputation scores in-line. Also new for 2015, we released into beta a first version of a scoring engine that can help predict badness and also help with the ongoing problem of helping threat intelligence analysts and incident response professionals understand which warning flags they need to care about.
Customers
If cybersecurity was Fight Club, the first rule of Fight Club would still be that you do not talk about your customers. At least not without their specific permission. So I’ll just summarize by saying that I love our customers, we have an outstanding customer base that spans all major industry verticals and geographic continents. It is a customer base that doubled from 2014, and one that includes a third of the Fortune 100, and one that continues to exhibit 90%+ renewal rates year after year. Thank you for believing in our company and our products.
Team
The only thing greater than our customer retention in 2015 was our employee retention. If you ever visit Seattle, please come by our office so I can introduce you to our smart, hard-working, dedicated and growing team of DomainTools professionals. We grew headcount 50% in 2015 and as a result if you visit after Q1 you’ll see us in a new office space down the street.
We enter 2016 thrilled with our growth in all four of these critical areas, but ever-motivated to continue to deliver value and service to our customers. Thanks for reading.
