FireEye Lands On The NASDAQ

Security consolidation and growing privacy concerns are driving demand for end-to-end solutions that can protect data at rest as well as in motion across the entire enterprise. But the industry has not yet risen to the challenge, which is proving to be more daunting than ever in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and corporate networks that stretch across the cloud and employee-owned devices.

Fresh off its highly successful public offering, FireEye is looking to fill this gap with the acquisition of Mandiant, a privately-held provider of end-point security solutions and incident response services. The firm, which lists more than a third of the Fortune 100 among its customers, entered the media spotlight earlier this year after tracing a series of attacks against the New York Times and other high-profile U.S. targets to a secretive branch of China’s military.

The acquisition is valued at approximately $1 billion in stock and cash, representing one of the biggest cyber security exits in recent memory. Kevin Mandia, Mandiant’s founding CEO, has been appointed as the chief operating officer of the combined company, which will focus on delivering a unified offering encompassing mobile, network analytics, and consulting services.

“Organizations today are faced with knitting to either a patchwork of point products and services to protect their assets from advanced threats,” noted David DeWalt, the chairman and CEO of FireEye. “Together, the size and global reach of FireEye and Mandiant will enable us to innovate faster, create a more comprehensive solution, and deliver it to organizations around the world at a pace that is unmatched by other security vendors.”

Mandiant’s technology will be packaged with FireEye’s flagship Multi-Vector Virtual Execution engine, which filters network traffic for malicious activity in an isolated container that puts a real time twist on traditional firewalls. The technology is already compatible with with Mandiant’s software thanks to the pair’s two-year partnership prior to the acquisition.