Did anyone else catch this stat on Crunchbase: "M&A deal-making in the cybersecurity space continues to slow with only 13 deals announced for VC-backed startups in the first quarter of the year" Do you think the decrease in cybersecurity M&A is going to impact innovation or could it lead to consolidation in terms of vendor offerings (that is perhaps a needed change)?
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CTO in Softwarea year ago
For the consumer this isn't necessarily a bad thing - it means existing products will need to get continuously better to grow their customer base and their revenue. What I expect to see is growing pressure from the open source space.CISO in Softwarea year ago
Agreed entirely, and I'm here for it!
In one of the conversations I'm referencing above the concept of agility and time to market, traditionally having been one of the innovator's advantages, came up. They posited that GAI has shortened the larger player's time to develop and deploy new features so quickly that the advantage has mostly been erased. The example was made of Mcdonald's already having a GAI-powered chatbot to provide conversational ordering capability integrated into their mobile app.
With pressure from both ends you gotta wonder what kind of diamonds will come out the other side. I do anyways.
Chief Information Security Officer in Healthcare and Biotecha year ago
Agreed. I have experienced multiple good ideas are dropped only because multiple people are working on the same things. Director of Network Transformationa year ago
We are awash in tools right now. According to Panseer, "the shift to cloud and remote working has driven a 19% increase over the past two years in the number of security tools organizations must manage – from 64 to 76." And I would argue maybe half of these tools are deployed and utilized. This has led leadership to tighten the organizations belt and consolidate. Case in point, the SSE marketplace. Multiple point tools - SWG, CASB, DLP, Remote Access - delivered from a single vendor. Added to this, the cost of money is higher. Interest rates increased thus the pool of available money for VCs has decreased. On top of this, exits in terms of IPOs are low. Thus the VCs are asking to reduce their risk as well as when they do invest, taking a greater % ownership of the company (bad for founders)...
Innovation will continue. Just at a slower pace..
This space is far too ripe for disruption for innovation to disappear. We're in a transition period between the last generation of security tools (SIEM, traditional VA management) to whatever the next generation will look like, and it's emerging with a heavy focus on context and reeeeeeally leaning-in to GAI.
I don't think it's a matter of whether it'll "lead to" consolidated vendor offerings so much as it will accelerate that.
That's my $0.02 YMMV