I have been taking a look at the security industry lately as I get back into being a full time analyst. Preliminary results indicate that about 30% of 1,200 companies I tracked two years ago have either been acquired or have quietly disappeared. Anyone who has followed this blog over those years knows that I often object to calling this industry consolidation.
Most acquisitions are part of what I think of as the security industry life cycle. Big companies with brands and established sales channels and big customer bases acquire rapidly growing successful technology companies that are formed to counter the latest threat. Even though there is a 15% per year turn over rate there are still dozens of new security companies every month that make up for the loss. That said we are seeing signs of consolidation. Websense bought Surf Control. McAFee bought Secure. Large mergers/acquisitions indicate we are entering a new phase of the industry.
All of this turmoil in the industry coupled with the escalating threats creates the need for both a stand alone IT security research firm and a site to discuss and hopefully illuminate the chaos. Thus IT-Harvest has been re-launched to cover the industry and now ThreatChaos.com, my original blog is being re-launched as a destination site for security news, views, and analysis. I will no longer be writing new posts for Network World although I will probably re-post a lot of content here.
As always you can email me at richard@it-harvest.com, call me at 650-388-6402, or follow me on twitter.
Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst. He is currently consulting, speaking and writing on all manner of security topics for IT-Harvest, the IT research firm he founded to cover the security space. He was most recently chief marketing officer for Fortinet. He has served stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Gartner, and Webroot Software.
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