AI Readiness, Microsoft MISA, and the Punk Rock Museum with JP Bourget of Blue Cycle

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing podcast, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts, and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer.

**Gianna Whitver** (0:29)
Hello, folks, and welcome to another episode of Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing. I'm your host, Gianna Whitver, here with a fantastic, I want to think of a second adjective for you.

**JP Bourget** (0:42)
Punk rocker.

**Gianna Whitver** (0:43)
Yeah, punk rocker guest. We have JP Bourget.
He's so interesting. He's the chief executive officer of Blue Cycle. He's also an entrepreneur in residence at Lytical Ventures, and the official punk rocker for the Polaris Collective. JP, thanks for being on.

**JP Bourget** (1:02)
Yeah. How's it going? Happy Olympics.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:05)
Happy Olympics. By the time this airs, it will be way past the Olympics. Who do you predict is going to win the gold in whatever's next?

**JP Bourget** (1:11)
Win the Olympics?

**Gianna Whitver** (1:12)
Yeah.

**JP Bourget** (1:13)
Norway is way ahead. They always win. But I've been watching a lot of curling, and my kids are into ski jumping and snowboard jumping.
Apparently, the Americans are really good at biathlon this year, or cross-country skiing this year.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:25)
Nice.

**JP Bourget** (1:26)
I'm really excited for the women's gold medal game, which will be tomorrow, February 20th, and then see if the men could take it all too.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:34)
Awesome. By the time, should we make a bet? Then by the time this episode airs, we can like-

**JP Bourget** (1:39)
Yeah, we'll have to pay up at RSA.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:42)
We have to pay everybody who's in the audience listening if we get it wrong.

**JP Bourget** (1:46)
I'm not sure if I will make that bet.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:50)
All right. Well, to jump into our conversation today, we are going to talk about a couple of things. The MISA, the Microsoft-

**JP Bourget** (1:56)
The Microsoft Intelligence Security Organization.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:59)
The Microsoft Intelligence Security Organization Association and how Blue Cycle got into it. We're going to talk about what you're seeing in the market, what clients are actually paying attention to in terms of AI readiness and where we are lacking AI readiness capabilities. We're also going to talk about the SIM market if we have time in marketing.
I actually can't wait to have this conversation because it's really fun to talk to. This will be great. Before we jump in, what the heck is Blue Cycle?

**JP Bourget** (2:28)
Blue Cycle is- I'm a cyclist. Fourteen years ago, I rode a bike across the US with Bruce Potter, the guy who runs ShmooCon, him and his wife.
When I sold my SOAR company in 2020, I needed a name.
It started out as FinSyn, which is like a networking joke. It's kind of like a syn packet or a syn flag in a fin flag. But then that was like the dumbest name ever. And my last company was Syncurity. So I was like, it's the end of syn. I'm a big cyclist. I'm in the Blue Team. Blue Team is about process in OODA loops and things like that. And so I just came up with Blue Cycle and my babysitter, Erdani at the time, made the logo. And it's kind of stood the test of time.

**Gianna Whitver** (3:08)
I like it. Blue, and it's a circle.

**JP Bourget** (3:11)
I actually just got trademarks like last year. It's like not a huge deal because I've been using it. I haven't found one exactly like mine. There's stuff similar, circles pretty common, but I haven't found that one. So that's kind of how it started. And we're a cyber, we like to think ourselves in two ways. One is we're strategic advisors to our clients. I'm seeing this term from Cribl, like we're a little serious but irreverent. We're irreverent but serious. I know we can't say swear words on this podcast, but if I can't say unfract to you on a call, like I don't have to, we're just real.
We want to get outcomes, we want to get you in a better state, and it's really hard to do that in an uptight environment.
We're pretty laid back, pretty chill, but we're also really serious. We try to put out really good work all the time.

**Gianna Whitver** (3:57)
What is the type of work that you do? What are the outcomes?

**JP Bourget** (4:03)
We started out as advising MSSPs, MDR vendors, XDR vendors, as well as psychops teams around data pipeline work and data engineering. So doing things like getting in front of the SIM to have control over what data was going to the SIM and start to bifurcate that out to better ways to store the data. We really believe that having Cribl or another tool on the left of the SIM gives the business agility so that they're not stuck into this one particular solution.