Verve Industrial: History, Values & Experience
Verve’s mission is to help our clients ensure the security and reliability of their most critical assets: their industrial control systems. Verve Industrial brings over 25 years of ICS/OT experience to bridge the IT OT challenges of securing these environments.
We are a partner to our clients in their security & reliability journey. That journey is not solved with a single project or the one-time sale of a tool. We walk alongside our clients in helping them increase the maturity of their systems and processes over time.
Our history has taught us that solutions require a combination of software and services. Our goal is to help our clients make measurable improvements in reliability and security. From our experience, that requires bringing together the world’s leading control system experts with innovative cybersecurity and system monitoring technology for a comprehensive design, assessment, remediation and monitoring of OT networks.
For over 12 years, Verve has invested in the leading platform for OT/ICS security. We built it with direct feedback from clients as to their needs in simplifying the complexity of OT/ICS security. The Verve Security Center takes a platform approach to bring together robust asset inventory, vulnerability assessment, threat detection and the ability to safely remediate risks. Our software team is dedicated to developing a solution that achieves measurable impact at the lowest possible total cost of ownership.
Verve Industrial Protection was born out of an industrial services and engineering company (formerly known as Rkneal) that got its start in 1994 as an OT systems integrator. Today, the legacy lives on in the 1,000+ automation and control system projects we’ve completed as we’ve transitioned into the Verve you know today. Verve Industrial now serves industries across utilities (such as power, oil & gas, water), manufacturing, healthcare, chemicals, oil & gas, mining, and building controls.
Our Story
Verve’s 25 years of industrial cyber security experience
- 1994
RKNEAL was born
Bob Bevis founded RKNEAL in Paducah, Kentucky as a vendor-agnostic partner to help clients improve OT/ICS reliability. Focus on control system automation in power, water, steel, paper industries. Vendor neutral, so provided solutions best for customers, not the OEM vendor. Became subject matter experts at all major DCS and PLCs in the market.
- 2000
Expanded reliability
RKNEAL expanded capabilities to offer vendor-agnostic managed reliability services. Focused on real time data historians, smart and optimized process control.
- 2003
Tech advancement
Began developing components on control systems that would later become the benchmark architecture for our flagship Verve security center several years later. Included how to discover assets, backups, change management, patching, logging in an OT environment on all major DCS and PLC platforms
- 2007
NERC CIP guidelines
NERC, under the authority of FERC, passed and enforced the first ICS cybersecurity compliance regime in North America. Helped fortune 100 companies with network segmentation, secure remote access, enterprise firewall installations to protect control systems. Became the subject matter experts for IT security groups to consult with to understand how to secure OT environments.
- 2008
Verve Security Center
First deployment of the Verve Security Center to address NERC CIP compliance requirements and best general security on OT environments. Took the 14 years of experience in control system environments, the proven tools developed since 2003, and integrated these into a product. Expanded development staff to include global resources.
- 2013
Geographic expansion
Opened the St. Louis office dedicated to expanding Midwest presence. Expanded the Verve platform to an Open platform to create a single pane of glass for OT/ICS security. Grew significant enterprise customer base, and competed against single OEM DCS vendors solutions.
- 2017
Verve rebrand
RKNEAL rebranded as Verve Industrial Protection to emphasize the growing importance of ICS/OT cybersecurity with our vast 20+ years of control systems experts. Expanded global resources and expanded our US based development group with new offices in Chicago and Madison and first resources placed in the UK. Won worldwide customers in Europe and China. CIS 20 and other security benchmarks driving business in manufacturing.
- 2018
Launched v 6.0 platform
Launch of industry’s first vendor-agnostic endpoint management platform that allows Think Global: Act Local architecture. Complete fork lift product development of scalable, one of a kind product. Tripling of growth and resources. Competing still against single OEM security platforms with over a 90% success ratio. Worldwide presence and name recognition accelerating. OEM vendors and fortune 100 companies pursuing partnerships with Verve.
- 2019
Demand grew
Demand grew at a high pace. Development staff doubled again. New integrations accelerated into devices seen in non-power industries. Platform scaled to accommodate worldwide customers.
- 2020
Verve advances to v 8.0
Verve expands to serve 100 customers across five continents and six major industry verticals. Competing against some of the largest security vendors with 90pct success ratios. Replacing out of date solutions put in place by vendors that have not updated products in years. Added cloud based architecture on azure, aws, and private cloud platforms.
25 Years of Verve for ICS Security
| Verve, formerly RKNEAL, has been in the business of control systems management for 25 years. Verve Industrial Protection has three capabilities: Design for Defense, Verve Security Center and Verve Industrial Protection (VIP) Services. |