Founded in 1999, CyberArk went public in September 2014 in what was overall alukewarm affair in the security industry.
However, much like the swan which appears elegant on the surface, CyberArk has been busy paddling away underwater with its second acquisition in almost as many months.
Its first acquisition was Cyberintel for an undisclosed amount – estimated to be in the region of $20m.
The acquisition of Viewfinity is reported to be for $30.5m in cash and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2015.
Acquiring Viewfinity will add an estimated $7-9m in revenue to CyberArk. But more importantly, it forges a strong tie-in of privilege management with the endpoint. Two immediate benefits jump out – firstly it gives CyberArk access to the endpoint where Viewfinity deploys an agent.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, from a customer-centric perspective, it provides an extended (and eventually integrated) offering to demonstrate value that can come from privilege management to include mitigating endpoint vulnerabilities.
Javnalysis
Whilst this acquisition makes sense from a technical perspective, it was surprising to see CyberArk make two consecutive acquisitions in quick succession. In the privilege management space, there’s little doubt CyberArk is one of the prominent players and as such it doesn’t have the luxury of learning from the mistakes of others. With an already established customer-base, as long as CyberArk can turnaround technological integrations, it could continue to pick up smaller security technologies in the region of $30m to further its competitive advantage against the likes of BeyondTrust, CA, Centrify, Lieberman Software, Osirium, Thycotic and Xceedium.
Javvad Malik 