Page 64 - CDM-Cyber-Warnings-March-2014

3 3$ .% $1&$12 -# "04(2(3(.-2 (- 3'$ 8!$1 $%$-2$ .1+# History indicates that as we come off a very deep recession we can expect a wave of acquisitions. There have been some big deals announced recently: Facebook buys WhatsApp, Google buys Nest, and Lenovo buys Motorola. One of the first things many companies cut during rough times is research and development. The other is marketing. When both these budgets get cut, it tends to put companies behind when it comes to investing for the future. When the economy improves companies need to catch up on innovation. Companies also need to get their brand and products back into the public mind-share. Acquisitions are a way to do both these things. Strategic and targeted acquisitions help companies get back some of the time they lost due to budget cuts during tough times. What can we expect in the cybersecurity world? According to a report from Gartner, Symantec remains the leading security vendor, with 19.6% market share in 2012, and McAfee is second with 8.8%. Those two have held those top positions for some time now, but their market shares are down from 26.6% and 11.8% respectively in 2007, according to Gartner. Neither company has been very active in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) recently. Symantec’s last acquisition was in January 2012 when it acquired LiveOffice, a provider of cloud-based data archiving and storage, for $115 million. It didn’t make any acquisitions in 2013. McAfee, one of the most active acquirers in the industry prior to its acquisition by Intel in 2011 for $7.6 billion, did 2 deals in 2013. McAfee bought ValidEdge, an anti-malware sandboxing technology, in February 2013 for an undisclosed amount, and Stonesoft, a network firewall design company, for $289 million in May 2013. The lack of activity by the big two is in keeping with historical trends. History indicates that they will now be very aggressive and looking for acquisitions now that the economy is improving. But is that really the case? Symantec is in the middle of a reboot. It just fired its second CEO in 18 months. Steve Bennett, th the former CEO of Intuit, was fired on March 20 , is now operating with an interim CEO, and is working to find a CEO who could "drive the next stage of Symantec's product innovation and " # % " $ " # ! !