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5 Mergers for a Less Aggravating IT Security Industry

Tired of wading through an overly saturated security market in search of the right defenses for your company? Here are some mergers security experts say would make the industry more tolerable.

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

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"The Imperva/Checkpoint idea is driven by the fact that Checkpoint's aim is to own the firewall market. Imperva is taking names due to PCI and would help solidify Checkpoint's game plan to own the firewall space.

"RSA lacks a good IDS/IPS product and needs to work to maintain its market share. I'm thinking that RSA still has the encryption brand name and would do well to start to market that they are a broader security play.

"IBM, meanwhile, is trying to be the service and software shop all in one and so adding Sophos to their portfolio would allow them better traction in the endpoint market, further extending their endpoint and server ownership strategy."

Top 5 mergers wished for by Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest
Stiennon would like to see:

1. Reflex Security and RSA
2. Juniper and Fortinet
3. Kaspersky, Eset, AVG, Panda, and AhnLabs (for an uber-AV company)
4. Crossbeam and StoneSoft
5. AlgoSec and Cisco

Stiennon explains his choices:

"Reflex has become a virtualization security company. They are all about the data center. EMC, a big data center provider with a desire to push into security, could take Reflex's product and provide it to their customers.

"Juniper does not have a good UTM story and zero security research. Fortinet is bigger today than Netscreen was when Juniper bought them. By buying Fortinet, Juniper would finally have a security story.

"There are a confusing number of AV companies usually with a regional strength and revenue near $100 million. A combination of several good AV companies would give Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro a challenge.

"Stonesoft has perfected the software firewall but does not have a strong appliance play. Crossbeam has been blindsided by Checkpoint's acquisition of Nokia's appliance business. Crossbeam plus Stonesoft would be a Nokia-plus-Checkpoint killer.

"Despite years of trying Cisco has never grown past CLI. Algosec is a stand-alone firewall policy management company with a great product that already works with Cisco's firewalls. It's a natural acquisition."

Top 5 mergers wished for by Mike Rothman, keeper of the Security Incite blog and senior vice president of strategy at elQnetworks.
Rothman would like to see:

1. HP and a Big AV vendor TBD
2. Cisco and Fortinet
3. Oracle and Imperva (or Guardium)
4. Symantec and GuardianEdge (or CREDANT)
5. IBM and Fortify

Rothman explains his choices:

"HP needs to get a bigger presence in the security space. There have been rumors of an HP/Symantec deal for years, but that's probably too big a pill to swallow. McAfee is a good fit, but it would also be a big deal. More likely is someone like Trend or Sophos, which are big enough to make a difference, but not so big to be challenging to integrate.