One Acquisition to Rule Them All
The Cybersecurity Industry saw 420 or US$84bn worth of acquisitions last year, with the headliner of Google acquiring Wiz for US$32bn. Business is booming, headlines are being made, but is the industry actually benefiting from this?
There has been a huge influx of capital from the tech conglomerates dedicated to acquiring promising startups and existing cybersecurity firms. Google acquired Wiz to buy its way out of a cloud security deficit, Palo acquired CyberArk to capture the PAM market and extend its IAM portfolio, and Cisco acquired Splunk to enhance its telemetry capabilities. The list goes on. The conglomerates are shoring up their products with their cybersecurity complements. The greater benefit that is often omitted is implicitly weakening their competitor's product. An agnostic CNAPP platform tries to be the best for all cloud environments; a CNAPP platform owned by your biggest competitor - what would that be best for?
Wiz, founded by Israeli-American founders, was the second portion of the cloud security space sold to Silicon Valley. Having sold Adallom - a CASB - to Microsoft for US$320mn, they rolled that vision into a new company, Wiz, a comprehensive CNAPP platform - arguably the best in the business, followed by a 100x acquisition of US$32bn.
Wiz, by all metrics, is a fantastic platform that has advanced the stagnant CNAPP space rather than capitalizing on a budget requirement for CISOs. They have snatched away market share from their dormant competitors, Prisma Cloud and MSFT Defender for Cloud. While it may only have ~15% of market share, it has 45% of the F100 using it - and I'm sure that market share will tick up as CNAPP renewals start to surface.
For Google, it was perfect. It will eventually revitalize discussions for their beleaguered GCP ~as Wiz silently tailors to their platform~, placing them as the innovation driver for the CNAPP space without having to put in extensive R&D. It also has the side benefit of expanding their security roster composed of Mandiant (TR and IDR), Siemplify (SOAR), and Chronicle (SIEM).
