Tuesday, January 14, 2014

What is behind these recent acquisitions by Palo Alto Networks and FireEye ? Domain Talent and Virtualization


Security is a red hot fascinating sector right now, acquisitions are happening left and right and I have stopped trying to do a financial valuation, there is something else happening. When money is cheap, I see these acquisitions happening as a race to get ahead with talent and new technology. But payoff will come for those who are first with economies of scale.

The two outstanding reasons for these acquisitions in my opinion are Virtualization in Security and Talent with domain expertise. Many security startup are focusing on use of in-situ virtual sandboxes to investigate suspicious files to detect malware before letting them loose in the main network.

Blue Coat Systems acquired Norman Shark, which had developed a sandboxing technology platform for malware analysis.  Palo Alto network acquired Morta Security  (CEO Raj Shah) a Silicon Valley-based security startup to bolster its cloud-based WildFire malware inspection technology. Aim was to get NSA talent as well as the virtualization technology. A week earlier FireEye acquired Mandiant which provides endpoint security software and is well known for its threat intelligence research and incident response services.

So what next ….. I am waiting to see some big - Bigdata plus Security related acquisitions and they are coming sooner than you will expect ….


Safe Surfing …

No comments: