Contact: Scott Denne
Fresh off its $990m acquisition of Mandiant, FireEye positions itself for a security consolidation push. During last night’s earnings call, CEO Dave Dewalt laid out the case for the company to consolidate its products across several security categories. He argued that offerings in existing security groups, such as intrusion prevention and endpoint protection, are no longer effective and that FireEye would be well served to offer a fuller product portfolio to address those categories, rather than continuing to sell exclusively outside of well-established product lines.
There’s no question that FireEye has the resources to pick up almost anything it wants. Even after Mandiant, the company still has $173m in cash on hand, it’s planning a secondary offering that could reach $700m and – as it showed with its stock-heavy purchase of Mandiant – its shares are valuable enough to be used for acquisitions (though its stock dipped 10% after the company gave weaker-than-expected guidance).
While Dewalt’s assessment of some of the existing security markets is not without bias, surveys by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, paint a picture of a market in flux, with several new names popping up in our most recent security surveys. Multiple categories are now ripe for consolidation, with spending spread across a growing number of vendors. In advance malware response, for example, our surveys turned up 34 different firms, up from 25 the year before.