FireEye has announced the acquisition of security services vendor Mandiant for $1 billion (£608 million).
Together, the two companies will offer FireEye’s virtual execution and sandboxing technology along with Mandiant’s incident response management and remediation solutions. According to FireEye, this acquisition creates the industry’s leading advanced threat protection vendor with the ability to find and stop attacks at every stage of the attack lifecycle.
Under the terms of the merger agreement, FireEye will issue an aggregate of 21.5 million shares and options to purchase shares of FireEye stock and pay approximately $106.5 million of net cash in the transaction to the former Mandiant security holders.
Mandiant will be integrated into FireEye to provide global services and cloud solutions, including security consulting, incident response and managed services. Mandiant’s endpoint threat detection and response products will be incorporated as a core element of the FireEye Oculus platform.
Mandiant has been a strategic alliance partner of FireEye since April 2012. Kevin Mandia, Mandiant’s founder and chief executive officer prior to the acquisition, has been appointed by the FireEye board of directors to the position of senior vice president and chief operating officer of FireEye.
He said: “The combination of FireEye and Mandiant will deliver end-to-end protection and meaningful value to customers.
“By joining FireEye and Mandiant, we will be able to deliver fully integrated products and services that help organisations protect themselves from attacks. The combined product portfolio will cover all the major attack points within an organisation, and our expanded services capacity will allow us to quickly pivot to incident response when necessary to reduce the impact of security breaches.”
Mandiant chief security officer Richard Bejtlich said on Twitter that a benefit of the deal “is melding prevention with detection and response, across multiple platforms and many customers.”
David DeWalt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of FireEye, said: “Organisations today are faced with knitting together a patchwork of point products and services to protect their assets from advanced threats. 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 organisations around the world at a pace that is unmatched by other security vendors.”
