Reston-based Hubble is helping companies manage remote work through device intelligence

To technologist and entrepreneur Tom Parker, the struggles faced by companies last year while trying to facilitate massive, simultaneous moves to remote work devices were only part of a much larger problem. Management of assets like laptops, phones and tablets remotely had an industry gap he had noticed for years.

“The idea of asset management has largely been focused around, ‘I just got this shipment of Dell laptops, and I know I need to write down who is assigned to it in the service tag,'” Parker, a former Accenture Security CTO and cofounder of cybersecuity firm FusionX, told Technical.ly. “There are a lot of other use cases, like [determining] what software is running on the device, what it’s being used for, what data it has on it. Those questions aren’t being answered by existing legacy solutions.”

Last July, Parker founded the Reston, Virginia-based asset intelligence startup Hubble, which is backed by influential venture capital firm Accel, to provide those answers. Using a platform, not installed software, Hubble offers an overview of a company’s technology assets data, which can be used to reduce and manage risk. This ties into cybersecurity by providing info on who is accessing sensitive data, and from where. Parker said it also enables companies to understand their legacy IT environments, so they can transform or shift into more efficient and cost-effective environments and reduce costs.

“One of the big challenges with asset management when you have remote employees is where they are,” Parker said. “Are they in a coffee shop, or are they home? Are they connected to a home network that has other systems that have malware on them? These are all things that a business needs to know if you’re going to have an increasingly mobile workforce.”

While the service was particularly relevant with remote work over the last year, Parker said Hubble can also have value with organizations that have Bring Your Own Device policies for phones and laptops. Even if a company allows employees to use devices that were not purchased through the company, an employer might still want information on how much protection those devices have, or where they’re being used.

Hubble CEO Tom Parker.

“How do you understand that exodus out of the workspace to people’s homes, and understand what technologies are being used to access your environment, to touch your sensitive data?” Parker said. “It’s Hubble that you can bring in to paint a picture for all of that.”

At present, the company has under 10 employees and about the same number of pilot companies testing out its product, but it’s looking to grow considerably this year. Parker said he intends to add more customers onto the platform and will likely raise a round of funding towards the end of the year. He declined to say how much the company would be seeking.

“Companies in the SaaS space take about 12 months to get a product to market,” Parker told Technical.ly. “We had a product in the hands of pilot customers within four months, so we’re moving extraordinarily quickly.”