Interos Sees Surge in Demand for its Operational Resilience Platform as Bookings Grow 354% Over the Past Two Years

Supply Chain Shocks – the pandemic, SolarWinds, and U.S. trade war with China – are spurring multinationals to turn to fast, scalable technology to avoid future disruption

Company well-positioned to address Biden administration call for heightened supply chain resilience

 

 

 

ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 26, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Interos, the operational resilience company, is powering into 2021 with a surge in demand for its AI-propelled platform that maps, monitors and models risk in the extended supply chain for Fortune 500 companies and government agencies worldwide.

Interos – whose clients include US federal agencies as well as industry leaders from aerospace and defense, airlines, banking and insurance – has been taking on a host of new customers from the automotive, tech, and manufacturing sectors. The company, based in Arlington, VA., with offices in California, recently expanded its worldwide presence to include operations in Germany, France, the UK and Nordic countries.

The privately held tech solution-provider logged a bookings growth rate of 354% in the last two years. It notched a 133% increase in its annual recurring revenue in 2020 over the previous year and recorded 132% growth in the number of employees over the same period.

Company executives expect even stronger expansion of Interos’ top-line and its worldwide headcount this year. The new focus on shoring up supply chain operational resilience, whether among companies based in the United States or abroad, is not expected to abate anytime soon.

Major areas of concern focus on supplier concentration risk within certain markets and locations, supplier financial risk, and compliance risks around restricted country or company involvement. The recent SolarWinds attack showed the impact of growing global digital interconnectivity and resulted in the event being called ‘an attack of the American supply chain’.

In response to these and other concerns, President Joe Biden signed an executive order this week launching a 100-day review of supply chains critical to national security, public health, and public safety. The review will target four key industries: semiconductors, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and electric vehicle batteries, and will seek to discover opportunities to bring overseas jobs back to the country.

“We’re seeing the collective C-suite and the board of directors at companies around the world make supply-chain resilience a top priority across the enterprise,” said Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of Interos. “Companies, now more than ever, want visibility into their extended supply chain, down to the Nth tier, and they want to know in real time what risks are impacting those nodes at any given time. This all comes in the wake of the Black Swan events of 2020: the COVID-19 outbreak that rattled supply chains to the core, followed by the Solar Winds cyber hack that eroded trust in software integrity. President Biden now has taken a very welcome and necessary step in the right direction.”

The Interos founder noted that prior to Biden’s executive order, the U.S. government had taken several initiatives to shore up supply chain integrity and resilience in the federal space, where the company currently supports the U.S. Department of Defense among its public-sector clients.

“The new Biden administration must continue this emphasis on securing supply chains while crafting a modernized and comprehensive supply chain strategy,” she said. “The COVID response is clearly the administration’s top priority, including securing supply chains to expedite vaccine distribution.”

Interos recently added the following distinguished members to its Board of Advisors:

  • Dr. Richard Haass: President of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department, Haass is one of the country’s leading experts on foreign policy.
  • Mary Cheney: Cheney is a managing partner at communications firm New Troy Strategies. A veteran corporate and political advisor, Cheney is a highly sought-after marketing and PR expert who’s managed innovative campaigns across a range of industries including energy, telecommunications and agriculture.
  • Renee Wynn: Formerly the CIO of NASA and Acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Environmental Information, Wynn is widely recognized for her success at modernizing NASA’s IT acquisitions process and dramatically improving the agency’s security compliance.
  • Tom Foody: Foody serves as the CEO of Menlo Business Advisors and is a widely regarded operations and growth strategy consultant to venture firms and their portfolio companies.

Watch this video to learn more about Interos and the problem of supply chain risk.

About Interos

Interos is changing the way the world does business by mapping, monitoring, and modeling global supply chains. The company’s advanced AI-powered platform for eliminating multi-party, multi-factor risk from 3rd, 4th to nth tier parties provides continuous monitoring – across a host of risk factors – for the largest commercial brands in manufacturing, financial services, and aerospace and defense.

The Interos Knowledge Graph is the world’s largest business-relationship database containing millions of businesses and relationships, along with countless attributes and inputs. For more information, visit interosai.kinsta.cloud.

Contact info:
Rachel Forsyth
Finn Partners
[email protected]

President Biden Orders 100 Day Supply Chain Review — Sets the Stage for a New American Supply Chain for Critical Resources

By Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO, Interos

President Joe Biden is set to sign an executive order today that affirms the role of government in supply chain management, launching a 100-day review of supply chains critical to national security, public health, and public safety. The review will target four key industries (semiconductors, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and electric vehicle batteries), and will seek to discover opportunities to bring overseas jobs back to the United States.

The Biden review is a welcome and necessary step after the unprecedented supply chain disruptions of 2020, when COVID-19, increasing trade friction with China, and major cyberattacks like the SolarWinds breach demonstrate the immense fragility and criticality of American supply chains into focus. Only by adopting a whole-of-government approach to supply chain resilience – and by leveraging cutting-edge visibility tools – can we hope to tackle these multifaceted challenges.

Silicon Shortages Complicate Government Supply Chain Management

Many of the key issues precipitating the current period of supply chain disruption can be connected back to polysilicon, the base material used to manufacture computer chips. Polysilicon shortages have been driven by a number of factors. During the early days of COVID, auto manufacturers cut sales forecasts as demand for consumer technology was expected to greatly outpace the demand for vehicles, with polysilicon manufacturers adjusting their sales accordingly. With the demand for vehicles returning much faster than many anticipated, there’s not enough silicon to go around.

These issues are further compounded by rising concerns over Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) risk connected to polysilicon. There have been multiple news stories recently regarding the prevalence of forced labor in the solar panel supply chain. The industry is heavily reliant on the Xianjing region for polysilicon, but the presence of possible forced labor has led the Solar Energy Industries Association, the largest industry association in the United States, to call human rights abuses in the region “reprehensible” and strongly encourage companies “to immediately move their supply chains out of the region.”

Of course, ESG issues are only one factor motivating the Biden administration to closely examine the supply chain. Of even greater priority is the urgency to reduce dependence on foreign nations for critical resources, particularly China, to increase national security and bolster American economic independence. Today, just 12% of chips are made in the US, a significant reduction from 37% in 1990.

Just yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced he was seeking bipartisan support from the Senate to draft legislation designed to improve economic competitiveness with China and increase American semiconductor production.

Both Senator Schumer’s announcement, and today’s executive order, come hot on the heels of the previous administration’s attempts to secure supply chains. The Trump administration pushed the role of government in supply chain management through executive orders, prohibitions, and restrictions levied by the Treasury and Commerce departments, and through provisions within the annual defense budget like NDAA Section 889 Part B. For instance, in December 2020, the Department of Commerce added over 100 Chinese companies to its restricted entities list, which had already seen the addition of over 350 Chinese companies over the preceding two years.

A COVID-19 vaccine vial and syringe rest against a blue background.

The Challenges of the Vaccine Supply Chain

The microchip supply chain is but one of many. Of equal, if not greater immediate concern to the nation’s well-being, is the supply chain powering the manufacturing and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. Like microchips, vaccines are highly dependent on global supply chains. Few countries, if any, have the capacity to entirely manufacture and distribute vaccines themselves on the scale required to address COVID-19.

The Johnson and Johnson vaccine, for example, has contract manufacturers in seven sites in seven different countries, each of which serves a different role in the manufacturing process, requiring the drugs to frequently travel through multiple countries before arriving at their end destination. The international nature of this process adds regulatory complexity. AstraZeneca only has three approved producers in the EU, in part due to the difficulty in finding partners that meet both the region and the rest of the world’s stringent but different standards.

There’s also a host of raw materials challenges to address. Last year Pfizer cut their expected production in half due to raw materials shortages. Some specialized components of the vaccine, like lipids, the fatty cells that actually transport the genetic code in the vaccine into human cells, are only manufactured by a handful of companies in the world. Ensuring the US has access to a steady and secure supply of these and other specialized pharmaceutical materials will be a critical step in limiting the impact of the present and future pandemics.

In addition to today’s executive order, the Biden administration  has further defined the role of government in supply chain management by naming a Supply Coordinator that will “coordinate the federal effort focused on securing, strengthening, and ensuring a sustainable pandemic supply chain.”

Supply Chain Visibility is More Important Than Ever

This flurry of activity, and the multifaceted nature of the concerns driving it, highlight the importance of securing our supply chains, bringing back American jobs, and of taking action in a coordinated, strategic manner. To effectively address this crisis, we must adopt a comprehensive supply chain strategy, establishing a whole-of-government approach that encourages coordination and information sharing with industry.

Moreover, these events underline the pressing need to adopt holistic tools leveraging emerging technologies that give a complete and up-to-the-minute picture of our supply chains, and the risk that often lies hidden within them.  Without an accurate and up-to-date understanding of who we are truly reliant on, we cannot even begin to secure those relationships and pursue the much-needed American-based alternatives. In this year of unprecedented threats to our critical supply chain, we fully support the forward-leaning approach on supply chain resilience the administration is taking.

As the role of government in supply chain management grows, Interos can play a critical role to help both government and industry with its unique supply chain risk management technology. Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Interos maps, monitors, and models millions of supply chain relationships in real-time. Interos looks forward to not only partnering with the administration to better understand the issues that currently plague our supply chains, but also partnering with stakeholders to establish an unprecedented level of security for any future disruptions.

We now have to move – both the public and private sectors – towards operational resilience. Instead of waiting for a disaster to happen and to react, wouldn’t it be nice to know the information ahead of time to be able to preempt and position our organizations so we aren’t disrupted?

To learn more about how you can better secure your supply chain, visit interos.ai.

Interos And BitSight Win Contract to Protect Federal Supply Chains

Joint Effort Provides Risk-Monitoring Solution to DoD to Manage Risk and Help Ensure Compliance with Section 889 Mandates

ARLINGTON, Va. and BOSTON, Feb. 18, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Interos, the operational resilience company, and BitSight, the security ratings company today announced the pairing of BitSight security ratings with the AI-powered Interos platform to increase supply-chain resilience for a mutual DoD customer.

The joint effort will provide visibility into 3rd, 4th, and 5th tier parties in supply chains to mitigate risk by identifying factors related to relationships with prohibited companies, foreign ownership, vendor and geographic concentrations, as well as financial and cyber risk. BitSight’s cybersecurity ratings provide an external, validated, and continuously updated view into the security posture of a company. These ratings will join Interos’ other risk factors that are continuously monitored for the earliest signs of disruption.

“Government and commercial supply chains are comprised of the same millions of suppliers,” observes Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of Interos, based in Arlington, Va. “While they are both exposed to similar risks, they vary tremendously in their ability to access the information they need to detect those risks and prevent disruption of their supply chains. In this effort, we are providing the government with a common source of current information about risks in its supply chains that is essential for ensuring operational resilience — especially in light of pressing demands to comply with regulations, such as 889 and CMMC, effectively.”

Adds Steve Harvey, CEO of Boston-based BitSight: “Recent events have clearly shown the degree to which supply-chain risk can jeopardize the mission and imperil government and commercial entities. With BitSight’s continuously updated data on 300 million companies and the only security rating which has been statistically shown to correlate with the risk of breach, organizations gain continuous visibility into risks and interdependencies. The BitSight-Interos joint effort provides valuable cyber-risk data and unique digital relationship information to help customers manage supply-chain risk more effectively.”

About Interos
Interos protects the world’s largest enterprises — their operations and their reputations — from supply chain attacks by nation states and criminal organizations; from disruption driven by pandemics, tech, and trade wars; and from compromise related to unethical labor, financial distress, and sustainability challenges.

The Interos Knowledge Graph is the world’s largest business-relationship database containing billions of businesses, trillions of relationships, and countless attributes and inputs. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing, Interos reveals multi-tier nodes on the extended supply chain, infers relationships, monitors real-time events, and assesses risk – instantly and continuously. For more information, visit www.interos.ai or follow @InterosInc on Twitter.

About BitSight
BitSight transforms how organizations manage cyber risk. The BitSight Security Ratings Platform applies sophisticated algorithms, producing daily security ratings that range from 250 to 900, to help organizations manage their own security performance; mitigate third party risk; underwrite cyber insurance policies; conduct financial diligence; and assess aggregate risk. With over 2,100 global customers and the largest ecosystem of users and information, BitSight is the Standard in Security Ratings. For more information, please visit www.bitsight.com, read our blog or follow @BitSight on Twitter.

For media inquiries, please reach out to:
Monica Couvillion
Edelman, Corporate & Public Affairs
[email protected]

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Rachel Forsyth
Finn Partners
[email protected]

Interos Selected for Multiple Speaking Appearances at RSA 2021

CEO of global operational resilience platform Interos will be joined by key execs from Google, Gartner, Microsoft, and other organizations, reflecting rising concerns over physical and digital supply-chain risk.

Arlington, VA. — Feb. 02, 2021 — Interos, the operational resilience company, announced a major presence at RSA Conference 2021 today, with the SaaS solution provider scheduled to appear on four separate sessions at the cybersecurity conference.

Scheduled as a virtual event for the week of May 17th, the RSA Conference is considered the premier series of global events and on-demand programs for the world’s cybersecurity leadership, bringing industry together to stand against cyberthreats around the world.

Interos’ participation at the event highlights both the company’s rise to prominence as a global player in the supply-chain resilience space, as well as the increasing importance of supply-chain risk management within the cybersecurity community and the business world writ large. Resilience is also the chosen theme for RSA 2021.

“We’re very grateful to RSA for giving us the opportunity to share our experience on the criticality of securing our supply chains — and the steps businesses can take right now to deploy the best available in AI-powered technology,” said Jennifer Bisceglie, the company’s founder and CEO, who is featured in two of the four events where Interos is participating.

“Between COVID-19, increasingly devastating supply chain-driven cyberattacks like the recent SolarWinds hack affecting the U.S. government, and ongoing tech and trade wars with China, the world has been awakened to the latent risk hidden in global supply chains. We’re pleased to address RSA Conference participants to help everyone meet this challenge head-on,” Bisceglie added.

A widely regarded supply chain expert who has been called on to assist several congressional committees, federal working groups, and other organizations, Bisceglie is joined by Dr. Andrea Little Limbago, Interos’ VP of Research & Analysis.

Dr. Limbago’s presentation, Supply Chain Resilience in a Time of Techtonic Geopolitical Shifts explores how the geopolitical winds of change are upending global supply chains at an unprecedented pace and scope. Dr. Limbago will detail the challenges and opportunities associated with the emergence of distinct ‘technospheres,’ and how organizations can take steps toward greater resilience.

Interos will present as part of the following RSA Conference 2021 sessions:

5/18/2021 – 3.30PM PT
Supply Chain Resilience in a Time of Techtonic Geopolitical Shifts
Speaker: Andrea Little Limbago, PhD, Vice President, Research & Methodology, Interos

5/20/2021: 1.30pm PT
A Punch to the Supply Chain: Fighting Back to Resilience
Moderator: Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO, Founder, Interos Inc.
Robert Brese, VP, Executive Partner, Gartner; Former CIO, US Dept of Energy
Phil Venables, Vice President & CISO, Google Cloud
Edna Conway, VP of Global Security, Risk and Compliance, Microsoft Azure

5/20/2021 – 3pm PT
DBOM and SBOM: New Options for Better Supply Chain Cyber Security
Moderator:
Mark Weatherford, CSO and Board Member, National Cybersecurity Center

Panelists:
Chris Blask, Global Director Industrial Security, UNISYS
Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO, Founder, Interos Inc.
Tom Alrich, Owner, Tom Alrich LLC

Entire Event
Supply Chain Sandbox
Dr. Limbago will help run this year’s supply chain sandbox, an event that will run throughout the course of the conference offering games and hands-on-style exhibitions teaching core supply chain and resilience concepts.

About Interos

Interos protects the world’s largest enterprises — their operations and their reputations — from supply chain attacks by nation states and criminal organizations; from disruption driven by pandemics, tech, and trade wars; and from compromise related to unethical labor, financial distress, and sustainability challenges.

The Interos Knowledge Graph is the world’s largest business-relationship database containing billions of businesses, trillions of relationships, and countless attributes and inputs. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing, Interos reveals multi-tier nodes on the extended supply chain, infers relationships, monitors real-time events, and assesses risk – instantly and continuously. Learn more about Interos here.