Illumio is riding a wave of market segment accolades and record revenue growth, but is in no hurry to move on a highly anticipated initial public offering, CEO and co-founder Andrew Rubin said.

Forrester recently named Illumio as a leader in its "New Wave for Microsegmentation" report alongside rival Akamai Technologies. The zero-trust security segmentation unicorn also recently reported a record year of revenue growth, backed by a nearly 100% year-over-year surge in total bookings, and the addition of more than 140 new customers for its fiscal year ending in January. 

Rubin explained that Illumio has 27 customers at over $1 million annual recurring revenue, which showed its scalability and support potential, but more importantly it showed the market has hit an inflection point and is becoming more mainstream.

“It's probably fair to say that right now segmentation in all forms is going through probably the most significant awareness uplift that we've ever seen,” he said. “More enterprises are waking up and saying this is a core security control, I need to do this to protect my estate.”

Illumio offers zero-trust segmentation services for server workloads, endpoints, and native-cloud environments. Last October, it introduced CloudSecure to its lineup to bring zero-trust security to public clouds. 

The expansion strategy is to follow customers' estates, Rubin said, adding that “how to drive segmentation and zero-trust security into the OT environment” is one of the conversations that they are having more with customers. 

The vendor also plans to strengthen its go-to-market strategy and deploy products more into the mid-market, managed service provider, and federal government spaces. 

With its record growth, Illumio is expected to be one of the many cybersecurity vendors to go public this year. It scored a $225 million Series F funding round last year that pushed its valuation to $2.75 billion.

However, an IPO is not on Rubin’s day-to-day plans. 

“I don't have to worry about day in and day out what is the right date for that to happen,” he said. “Because there's no market pressure and there's no funding pressure, and those are usually the two things that would drive an answer of we're gonna do it this week or next week or next quarter.”

“​​I think that journey is playing itself out,” he added. Even though the segmentation category is still in its early stage, “there is zero doubt in my mind that whoever emerges in that space as the category and market leader will become and be a public company.”

Illumio recently appointed Jennifer Johnson as its CMO. Johnson served as chief marketing and strategy officer for Amplitude, which went public via direct listing last year, and as CMO at Tenable, which went with an IPO in 2018. 

“She's been in a few growth-stage companies that have grown quite a bit while she's there. That's where we are as a growth stage company,” Rubin said. “The fact that she's gone through this stage, including the IPO, I hope that all that experience becomes helpful for us too.”

Illumio’s microsegmentation services are also gaining traction. The Forrester report highlighted the vendor's differentiation in five of its 10 scoring categories, including policy management and enforcement, interface and reporting, product vision, and product and services support. 

Alongside direct ranking rival Akamai Technologies, Forrester named Aruba, VMware, and Cisco as “strong performers” in the market.

Rubin acknowledges the competition, but claims those vendors' offerings are much broader. “Cisco and VMware have been competitors of Illumio since the day we came to market,” but they sit next to Illumio in almost every one of its customer environments.

“I think everybody is figuring out where the competitive differentiation is in the landscape,” he added. “Our differentiation is certainly within some of the details of the product, but the biggest differentiation by far is the size and scale and maturity of our deployments.”