The New Year started with a bang for the technology industry – when it comes to acquisitions, at least.
Data, cybersecurity and AI featured high on the acquisition arena, in 2020’s first 3 tech acquisitions on record.
Veeam Software
On 10 January 2020, Insight Partners announced today that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Veeam Software. Under the ownership of Insight Partners, Veeam will become a US company, with a US-based leadership team, while continuing its global expansion from offices in 30 countries and with customers in over 160 countries.
The acquisition, which is expected to close during the first quarter of 2020, will enable Veeam to accelerate its Act II (Veeam’s evolution into Hybrid Cloud), expand into new markets and continue its growth trajectory. As part of the acquisition, William H. Largent has been promoted to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) – he previously held the role of Executive Vice President (EVP), Operations – and Danny Allan has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Following an investment from Insight Partners at the beginning of 2019, Veeam, with over US$1 billion in annual sales and more than 365,000 customers worldwide, worked alongside Insight Partners’ business strategy and ScaleUp division, Insight Onsite, to expand its software-defined Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform.
“Veeam has enjoyed rapid global growth over the last decade and we see tremendous opportunity for future growth, particularly in the US market. With the acquisition, we are excited that our current US workforce of more than 1,200 will be expanded and strengthened to acquire and support more customers,” said Largent. “Veeam has one of the highest caliber global workforces of any technology company, and we believe this acquisition will allow us to scale our team and technology at an unrivaled pace.”
FireEye
FireEye acquired Cloudvisory on 17 January 2020. The acquisition is aimed at adding cloud workload security capabilities to FireEye Helix, offering customers one integrated security operations platform for cloud and container security.
Founded in 2013, Cloudvisory provides continuous visibility, compliance, and security policy governance solutions for multi-cloud and data center assets. Cloudvisory offers a complete centralized security management solution for audit, compliance, micro-segmentation and enforcement through cloud-native controls of the various cloud platforms. The Cloudvisory solution operates across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, OpenStack and VMware, as well as traditional virtualized and bare metal environments.
“Customers need consistent visibility across their public and hybrid cloud environments, as well as containerized workloads,” said Grady Summers, Executive Vice President of Products and Customer Success at FireEye. “Cloudvisory delivers this visibility…. With the addition of the Cloudvisory technology, FireEye is able to offer a comprehensive, intelligence-led solution to secure today’s hybrid, multi-platform environments.”
“Joining FireEye offers Cloudvisory a unique opportunity to combine our innovative approach to cloud visibility and FireEye’s unrivaled insights into the threat landscape,” said Lisun Kung, Cloudvisory co-founder and chief executive officer prior to the acquisition. “We’re excited by the potential to quickly scale and help more organizations secure their cloud and container workloads.”
Qlik
On 22 January 2020, Qlik announced the acquisition of RoxAI and its Ping intelligent alerting software to deliver actionable, self-service alerting and workflow automation capabilities that enhance analytics users’ and systems’ ability to proactively monitor and manage their business data in real-time to make faster, insight-driven decisions.
With organizations looking to accelerate business value through data, while data is always changing, Ping’s self-service intelligent alerts, integrated with Qlik’s leading analytics platform, can immediately notify users through mobile, email and social channels of material changes in their data and the context, triggering decisions and actions immediately.
With Ping, any user can design and create their own advanced alerts around their own use cases – based on their existing dashboards and data – without needing a developer or administrator.
“The limitation of most analytical dashboards and applications is that you have to go there to know what’s happening, or what’s changed,” said Mike Capone, Qlik CEO. “What we need is full cycle integration between changes in the data, to analytics, to alerts and notifications that are immediately sent downstream to users or other systems. The combination of Qlik Data Integration, Qlik Data Analytics, and now RoxAI and Ping will provide customers with a real-time intelligence loop that drives actions.”
