On Monday, StillSecure announced that it has acquired ProtectPoint. ProtectPoint is a managed security service provider (MSSP) and immediately adds a portfolio of managed security products to StillSecure’s award-winning product arsenal. Alan Shimel, the Chief Strategy Officer of StillSecure, does an excellent job of explaining the reasons for the acquisition in his post titled StillSecure acquires ProtectPoint, entering the MSSP market – Why?
This is the second time in less than a month that a company I’m on the board of has made an acquisition. At the end of January, in my post titled Rally Software is a Buyer I wrote:
“[With regard to an acquisition strategy] I’m seeing this pattern with a number of the established companies I’m an investor in. Having gone through this cycle several times and had success and failure with acquisition driven strategies, I’ve got a clear view on when and how it can work successfully. I’m not interested in garbage truck mergers (two crappy companies that get jammed together to hope something good comes out of it) – all of my energy is focused on having a market leader pick up a complementary technology or market “asset” that helps accelerate the product or market roadmap.”
As with Rally’s acquisition of 6th Sense Analytics, StillSecure has been working on building out a set of managed security offerings around their product set. The demand for managed security services (or security as a service, or whatever you want to call it) has been steadily increasing and StillSecure decided to explore a buy vs. build approach to accelerate their entry into the market. StillSecure went searching for a company to acquire and found a great fit (functionally and culturally) with ProtectPoint and now has a fully built out and well regarded MSSP offering as part of its product mix.
Having spent some time with Steve Harris, the CEO of ProtectPoint, I’m really excited about what he and his team bring to StillSecure. I also have another person to hang out besides Alan when I head to Florida for a break from winter. Steve and team – welcome aboard!