Splunk is a firm based in San Francisco, and it provides data analytics. It recently stated that it has a plan for purchasing the 4-year-old startup Phantom Cyber for a cost of $350 million in cash and stock. And if this deal clears a regulatory review, then it’s going to be the company’s biggest deal made to this date!
Why Such a Decision From Splunk?
For Splunk, the purchase is a no-brainer. Phantom’s products serve the purpose of helping the IT security staff to automate their work which includes the use of Splunk to triage various incidents.
Splunk and Phantom first became partners in 2016 as part of an initiative which was targeted to help firmly integrate their products. The very same year, Phantom made a big hit at the annual RSA Conference which is considered to be cyber industry’s most significant event by placing first in a notable startup competition.
With the acquisition of Phantom, Splunk is clearly trying to keep up its momentum. Here the trick is to dig its anchor deep in the security orchestration and automation, which is undoubtedly a hot domain of the cybersecurity business.
On the other hand, Phantom too gets a good end of the deal. After Phantom’s most recent fundraising round in January 2017, the private value of the company was estimated to be no more than a $100 million including the $23 million raised as venture capital as per the news provided by Pitchbook which is a VC industry tracker.
The groups that invest in Phantom include the private equity giant, the Black stone group and In-Q-Tel, and the venture capital arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Haiyan Song, who is the head of Splunk’s security markets group, said that the deal, which is expected to close by this year’s first half, is the representative of a “shift in our industry, in how security needs to be done.”
It reflects that, in other words, businesses’ are somehow completely going to grow dependent on machines to raise their responses to all sorts of digital break-ins and data breaches.
Source: http://fortune.com/2018/02/27/splunk-buy-phantom-cyber-security/