The New Year certainly started out on a high note for us here at Cyphort with last Thursday’s announcement that FireEye acquired Mandiant.
My main take-away from the FireEye deal – especially on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Trusteer earlier in 2013 (another 10x+ multiple deal in a related space) is that defending against advanced threats is, and will be the most important, high-growth market in Information Security for the next few years. The overwhelming street acceptance of this acquisition underscores the huge opportunity in this space for innovation and tremendous market growth.
It also validates the founding premise of Cyphort – which is, that the targeted threats of today and tomorrow not only need continuously evolving behavioral solutions to detect them but also need to remediate these threats quickly. Clearly FireEye agrees, which is why it paid handsomely for Mandiant. However, as pointed out by an M&A expert quoted in a Forbes column on the acquisition:
“Mandiant had IPO potential two years ago, but…the startup’s services, rather than product, revenue was high to go public in the near-term. Services are usually harder to scale than products because they rely on numbers of employees, Daly noted, implying Mandiant would need to wait a couple of years before increasing product sales and going public.”
Sure Mandiant has an Incident Response platform, but its real expertise is its services arm. Given what FireEye paid for Mandiant, a large Incident Response team and a lot of manual interrogation seem to be an acceptable order of the day. But paying a premium for human expertise is not a scalable business model. As threats continue to get more sophisticated, Advanced Threat Defense (ATD) solutions will need higher fidelity platforms that evolve with these threats and drive quick remediation without requiring huge operational expenses.
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