by Brenon Daly
Having gotten a little richer in its mid-March IPO, Zscaler is now looking to get a little smarter with some M&A. In its first-ever acquisition, the cloud security vendor has reached for TrustPath, a startup that Zscaler plans to use to help speed and sharpen its analysis of the billions of transactions that flow over its platform each day. Not much is known about TrustPath, which is still operating in stealth mode.
Zscaler’s inaugural print continues the trend of information security (infosec) providers emerging as some of the busiest buyers of machine learning (ML) startups, a market that itself is pretty busy. In fact, for the past two years, tech investment bankers we have surveyed have forecast ML to be the single biggest driver for M&A in each of the coming years, ahead of other notable themes such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing.
More importantly, that sentiment is coming through in the actual deal flow. According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, the number of overall ML transactions is on pace to top 120 deals in 2018, three times the number announced just in 2015. Infosec is playing a key role in the record number of ML transactions, with Zscaler joining Amazon Web Services, Splunk and even PayPal in the parade of recent security-focused ML acquirers.
Collectively, infosec buyers are punching well above their weight in the emerging field of ML M&A. Look at it this way: Infosec accounts for roughly 15% of total ML deals in the M&A KnowledgeBase, despite security acquisitions making up less than 5% of all tech transactions we record in any given year.
The main reason for infosec’s outsized role in the ML market is that there’s actually business to be done there. In fact, in a recent survey by 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: AI & Machine Learning, Adoption, Drivers and Stakeholders 2018, infosec emerged as the second-highest rated use case for ML, trailing only ‘business analytics.’ Importantly, the rankings in our survey came from folks who actually have ML technology up and running or are nearly there. With that kind of demand from customers, it’s no wonder infosec suppliers are leading the charge in snapping up smarts.
