Following the news that cybersecurity company Cisco has made a $20billion offer to buy Splunk, Sapana Maheria, Practice Head of Thematic Research at GlobalData, a data and analytics company, offers her view.
“Cisco’s acquisition offer shows us that cybersecurity will continue to be a key driver of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in 2022. This deal was predicted by GlobalData back in January 2021 in its report ‘M&A in TMT – 2020 Themes’, which noted that the security software market was ripe for deals—especially those targeting companies in the behavioral analytics space.
“If the deal goes through, Cisco is expected to gain a dominant position in the enterprise security market. Splunk is ranked fifth out of 45 companies in GlobalData’s thematic scorecard for application software. The scorecard ranks companies based on their leadership in the 10 themes that matter most to the industry—generating a leading indicator of future performance. Further, Splunk has a score of 5 (out of 5) in the cybersecurity theme, which suggests that it holds dominant position in this theme.”
Meheria continued, “In its latest report, ‘Global M&A Deals in 2021 – Top Themes by Sector’, GlobalData has noted that cybersecurity was one of the biggest themes driving M&As in 2021. Thematic analysis of the top 20 deals in 2021 reveals that cybersecurity was the second most popular theme.”
Meheria added “The cybersecurity trend will continue in 2022, as the digital transformation of many businesses, driven in part by the impact of COVID-19 and the new hybrid working environment, has created multiple avenues for cybersecurity breaches and attacks.
“Drowning in a flood of security alerts, organisations struggle to discern real threats from harmless anomalous patterns. In many cases, IT managers fail to detect an actual breach for days, weeks, or even longer. Behavioral analytics uses several different techniques, including machine learning, to comb through large volumes of data to identify attacks more accurately.”
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