Google has won the battle for Mandiant and is to pay US $5.4B for the company in an all-cash transaction. A month ago, when Microsoft bid for the company, its shares surged by 18%. That valued it at just $4.3B. The bidding war between Microsoft and Google has added $1.1B to the company’s value in just one month.
Kevin Mandia, CEO, Mandiant, said, “Cyber security is a mission, and we believe it’s one of the most important of our generation. Google Cloud shares our mission-driven culture to bring security to every organization.
“Together, we will deliver our expertise and intelligence at scale via the Mandiant Advantage SaaS platform, as part of the Google Cloud security portfolio. These efforts will help organizations to effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.”
What happens to Mandiant now?
The plan, as far as it’s been revealed, is for Mandiant to become part of Google Cloud. The press statement states, “Together with Mandiant, Google Cloud will deliver an end-to-end security operations suite with even greater capabilities as well as advisory services helping customers address critical security challenges and stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle.”
Enhancing the capability of Google’s security offerings is good news for Google. Cloud providers are currently looking at gaps in their capability and where they can add value. For the big players such as Google, Microsoft and AWS, that means acquiring new companies. As organisations continue to move to the cloud, a wide-ranging and proven security portfolio is something they are likely to look for. This acquisition will tick a lot of boxes.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Google will be very happy that it has pulled off this deal. It not only strengthens its security offerings but has done so at the expense of Microsoft. It means that Microsoft will have to go back to the drawing board and look for another company to acquire.
The challenge for Google now will be the integration of Mandiant. Who will lead the new team? Will it be allowed to operate autonomously? If so, will Google fold any of its existing teams into Mandiant?
There is much here to be done now that the bidding is over.
