Ankur Arora on Making Corporate Security Impossible to Ignore
Ankur Arora, VP of Marketing at Ontic, didn’t arrive at marketing through the front door. He came in through the side, carrying a consulting toolkit, a forensic eye for business problems, and a father’s obsession with the perfect package.
Ontic is the system of record for corporate physical security, a category that most organizations have historically underfunded, misunderstood, and relegated to a back-office function. Ankur’s job is to change that, elevating security from a reactive cost center to a strategic business asset. With a background spanning Deloitte consulting, high-growth SaaS, and now enterprise security software, he thinks about markets the way a strategist does and talks to buyers the way only someone who’s sat across from them can.
In this Beyond the Brief conversation, he gets candid about what it means to market a product that protects people, why community matters more than pipeline in his world, and how a printing press in his father’s basement might explain everything.
The Non-Traditional Path
Q: You describe yourself as a non-traditional marketer. You came up through Deloitte consulting, not through brand or communications. What does that background actually give you that a conventional marketing career path wouldn’t?
Ankur: The consulting chapter gave me something that I think is genuinely rare among marketing leaders: the habit of understanding the business first and the marketing second. At Deloitte, you’re thrown in front of C-suite leaders at Fortune 500 companies from day one. You cannot show up uninformed. That pressure forces you to build a mental model for every client, every room, every conversation. Who is this person? What do they care about? What keeps them up at night?
That psychographic discipline translates directly into how I think about buyers and markets. And then there’s the analytical side. Consulting teaches you to live in the data and synthesize it fast. I genuinely think that’s my biggest differentiator as a marketing leader. Not just what story to tell, but how to connect the dots between the market, the product, the buyer’s needs, and the levers in the business. Most marketers are strong in one or two of those. I try to hold all of them at once.
The Ontic Opportunity
Q: Ontic sits in corporate physical security, a space most people conflate with cybersecurity or write off as a back-office function. What drew you to a market that, frankly, most marketers wouldn’t think to pursue?
Ankur: I analyze three things whenever I’m evaluating a move. First, the market. Is it growing? What are the tailwinds? Corporate physical security has enormous tailwinds right now, and unfortunately, we all know why. The macro environment is creating urgency. During COVID, you’d have thought the category would contract because nobody was in buildings. It actually accelerated. That tells you something about the durability of the problem being solved.
Second, I look at the product. Is it genuinely differentiated? And third, I can be helpful. I want to be somewhere I can actually move the needle, not just manage what’s already working. Ontic checked all three. The market is real, the problem is underserved, and the opportunity to define how the category thinks about itself, to help elevate security from a tactical expense to a strategic function, that’s a marketer’s dream. Big white space. High stakes. And a buyer who genuinely needs a champion. Physical security’s mission around protection makes it easy to wake up and do what we do.
Q: That phrase, elevating security from a tactical expense to a strategic function, is the spine of Ontic’s narrative. How do you make that land with buyers who’ve spent their entire careers being treated like a cost center?
Ankur: You have to meet them where the pain is. The biggest challenge our buyers face isn’t actually their security program. It’s that their own organization doesn’t fully understand what security does or what it’s worth. Being a strategic function means the senior leadership actively wants you in the room when big decisions get made. They struggle to translate their work into business language. So when we show up and say, here’s how you move above the line, here’s how you go from being a function that responds to incidents to one that produces insights that help facilities, real estate, HR, and leadership make smarter decisions, that lands. Because it solves the problem they couldn’t even articulate before we walked into the room.
I literally built a visual metaphor into our sales narrative. There’s a line. Below it is the operational world: detection, response, and incident management. Above it is strategic intelligence: data-driven insights that make the rest of the business smarter. Our goal is to help security leaders live above that line. When you give someone a way to visualize their aspiration, it becomes real.
Marketing a Category, Not Just a Product
Q: Ontic invests heavily in authority, with advisors who’ve run security for heads of state, a 600-person annual summit, and a robust content engine. You came into an organization that had already laid some of that groundwork. How do you build on it without losing what made it work?
Ankur: The groundwork here has been exceptional. Hiring genuine authorities, people like Fred Burton, who has written books on government security operations, is not something you retrofit. That credibility compounds over time. My job is to make sure the marketing motion amplifies it rather than dilutes it. The Ontic Summit is a perfect example. Six hundred security practitioners fly to Austin, not primarily to hear about our product. They come because it’s the authoritative space for their community. That’s hard to build and easy to squander.
What I’m focused on is making sure every touchpoint we control, the content, the summit, the digital experience, the sales narrative, all of it reflects that authority. We lead with best practices, not product. We position Ontic as the organization that helps security leaders do their jobs better, and the product is the vehicle that makes that possible. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s everything in a market where trust is the primary currency.
Q: The security community has what you called the first-cousin rule, where practitioners will act on a peer recommendation but won’t go beyond their immediate circle of trust. How does that shape your marketing strategy?
Ankur: It shapes everything. The first-cousin rule means that no matter how good our messaging is, if we’re not influencing the right rooms and the right conversations, we’re just noise. The amount of outreach I get as a marketing leader on any given day is unbearable. I cannot process it. So what do I do? I go to people I trust in communities I’m in and ask who’s using what. That’s how short lists get built. Not necessarily from the message I’m putting out, but from the conversations I can influence.
That drives our community investment, our advisor relationships, and our summit model. If the most respected voices in corporate security are in Ontic’s orbit, their first cousins will hear about it. Earned trust travels. That’s a fundamental truth in any complex enterprise category, and it’s especially true in security, where the downside of a wrong decision isn’t just a bad quarter. It’s a physical risk to people.
Building the Marketing Function
Q: You came into Ontic in a non-marketing role first, spending months purely in client-facing work before stepping into product marketing and eventually VP of Marketing. That’s an unconventional on-ramp. What did that path teach you about building the function you now lead?
Ankur: It gave me something most marketing leaders don’t get: genuine buyer intimacy before I had to make any decisions. I spent the first six months at Ontic doing nothing but sitting with customers and prospects. Understanding how they think. How do they describe their own problems? What they’re trying to prove to their organizations. Most CMOs and VPs of Marketing come in, they do a listening tour, and then they get pulled into the execution machine. I got to go deep before any of that pressure existed.
That experience shaped how I think about the function as a whole. The positioning work, the messaging refresh, the website overhaul, all of it was built on that foundation of customer understanding. And now that I own demand and brand as well, I try to make sure that grounding never gets lost. Marketing that’s disconnected from what buyers actually experience is just content. We want to produce something they feel.
Q: You’re now VP of Marketing at a company in high-growth mode in a category with genuine macro tailwinds. What does the next chapter of Ontic’s brand look like?
Ankur: Connected intelligence. That’s the term we’re anchoring on, and it’s deliberate. It captures what makes Ontic unique: the ability to unify data from disparate systems and sources into a single, coherent platform that lets security leaders see the full picture, act on it faster, and communicate its value to the business. That’s not a point solution. That’s a platform play, and it requires a brand that can carry the weight of that vision.
We want Ontic to be the name security leaders turn to when they’re ready to operate at a different level. Not just a vendor in their stack, but a genuine partner in their aspiration. That’s the brand work. And the Summit, the content, the advisor network, and the product itself all have to ladder up to that. When they do, and we’re building toward that now, the category starts to organize around us rather than us chasing it.
On the Record
Q: Is there a little-known fact about you that you’d care to share?
Ankur: It’s one of those things I don’t always connect to marketing until someone asks. My father ran a printing press when I was growing up. He would sit around with cardboard, cutting and assembling it by hand into packages for toys, car parts, and all kinds of things. He was completely obsessed with it, and I was obsessed with the fact that he was obsessed. There’s something about the way he would labor over how a package looked and felt that I absorbed without knowing it.
Then one day, a computer showed up in his little basement office, with CorelDRAW installed. He hired someone to run it, and I would watch this person design things. After they’d leave, I’d mess around with the files, try to create my own. I actually remember designing a menu for a small restaurant as a project. So when I think about my instinct for visual aesthetics, my obsession over how a brand looks and communicates before a single word is read, it all traces back to watching my father sweat over a cardboard box in a basement. That’s my real marketing school.
Ankur Arora is rewriting the brief for corporate physical security, one bold narrative, one trusted community, and one connected intelligence platform at a time. Thank you, Ankur, for sharing so many tremendous ideas and insights.