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A trio of acquisitions for Imperva

By February 7, 2014No Comments

The security industry is a hot bed of acquisitions and this week saw one of Eskenzi’s clients, Imperva, acquiring not one, but three firms.

In particular the acquisition of Incapsula sees Imperva move into a whole new sector, with the addition of DDoS mitigation technology to its suite. The interest of this addition is that, not only does it add a new sector of technology, but it puts it up against some major firms in that space. DDoS attacks are not a new concept, and the prevention by mitigating traffic not a new technology, but what this means for Imperva customers is the capability to mitigate application-layer attacks.

As a leader in the web application firewall space, Imperva is already well versed in the application protection sector, but this move allows it more leeway in the industry in a fairly open space. The acquisition of Prolexic by Akamai, and the arrival in the UK of another Eskenzi client, DOSarrest, in the past year show that this is a moving space.

Back to acquisitions though; what I find interesting about them is that it puts money back into a pretty cash-rich market. Companies buy and sell all of the time, and from time to time there are major acquisitions which take skilled people from start-ups into IT powerhouses. Sometimes they are a great fit, sometimes the secondment is carried out and the person takes their cash and invests into or begins a new start-up in an area they’ve always wanted to work in.

What this means is that there is always movement in the IT security industry. Nothing that is static is dynamic, and this industry thrives on creativity and ideas. Look at the £5 billion acquisition of McAfee by Intel in 2010 – I am sure that there were some shaky moments, but look at what has happened since: former McAfee CTO George Kurtz has formed the “attack back” firm Crowdstrike, while former McAfee executives joined another vibrant company, FireEye, who made their own headlines this year with the acquisition of Mandiant for a billion dollars.

For Imperva, Incapsula, Tomium and Skyfence, this is likely to be an exciting time. Incapsula are a well known brand, while the other two companies will see the opportunity to work with one of the industry’s most vibrant and important companies. For Imperva, this bolsters them further and will strengthen them further with a wider offering and footprint.