Rise of the Titans

By Peggy Tierney Galvin, Chief Strategy Officer

What Cybersecurity Leaders Can Take Away from the Google/Looker and Salesforce/Tableau Acquisitions

Executive takeaway: A roaring bull market and cheap debt means that Industry giants are still willing to pay top dollar for technology that plugs gaps in their solution portfolios. Security vendors with an exit strategy should double down on their technology partner activities and move aggressively to show how their solution solves their partners’ customer business pains—while the market is still hot.

In biotech, there’s a wry acronym used to refer to the contemporary way of finding new therapeutics: NRDO, or “no research, development only.” In technology, there’s been a similar trend, as market leaders have all gone on buying sprees to bring new IP to market at a rate far more rapid than it would take to develop internally.

The two recent acquisitions of our own Santa Cruz neighbor, Looker, by Google for $2.6 billion and Tableau by Salesforce for a whopping $15.7 billion are great examples of that. Both represent the driving market need to flow analytics throughout the sales cycle and for all parts of the enterprise to be able to pull actionable insights from each stage.

For security companies, there’s a huge opportunity to uplevel your messaging by talking about how you add value to this ecosystem. Don’t just describe your product feature sets. Pivot to showing how you support the scalable and secure flow of this data. For those with existing technology partners, look at how your technology could give your partner a competitive edge and amplify that message. With luck and hard work, yours could be the next front-page success story.

Maybe NRDO isn’t such a bad thing after all.