FireEye and McAfee Enterprise announce product mashup

The spun-off portions of security giants McAfee and Mandiant FireEye are set to be merged into a single security provider.

Investment firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) said that it will combine the product lines of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye into a single group.

The announcement was buried within another release touting the appointment of FireEye's Brian Palma as CEO of the combined McAfee Enterprise and FireEye Products entity. Ian Halifax will also join the merged group as CFO.

The aim of the move is to line up the McAfee Enterprise platform with FireEye's products and services to form a single set of products that can be pitched to businesses as an on-prem to cloud set of solutions.

"The combination of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye Products will immediately create a pure-play, cybersecurity market leader with more than 40,000 customers, 5,000 employees and nearly $2 billion of revenue," STG said in announcing the move.

"The new company's integrated security portfolio protects customers across endpoints, infrastructure, applications and in the cloud."

A merger of the two companies had been seen as inevitable since STG announced back in June that it had agreed to purchase the FireEye business from Mandiant and operate it alongside McAfee Enterprise. STG acquired the Enterprise branch of McAfee two months prior to that deal.

A likely next step will be for STG to spin off the combined companies as a new entity via an IPO.

Industry pundits note that while the McAfee Enterprise and FireEye product lines could be merged into a single end-to-end cloud and on-premise security suite, getting the two sides settled together will most likely be a difficult process.

"FireEye and McAfee are established, respected brands who will need to have a maniacal focus on customer success to retain their account base while rationalizing their collective product portfolio to then communicate to the market the go-forward strategy," said Doug Cahill, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

"There is a clear platform play with the combination of endpoint, network, email and cloud security unified with share threat intelligence and security analytics."

Eric Parizo, a principal analyst at Omdia, told SearchSecurity that one of the biggest challenges facing the two sides will be finding a way to create a combined entity without stepping on each other's toes.

"There is potentially calamitous product overlap in key areas such as endpoint (EPP/EDR), network security and SIEM, and these will need to be reconciled quickly while finding a way to sidestep turf wars," Parizo said. "But perhaps the biggest question is how two companies that were each independently sliding into industry irrelevancy can join forces to successfully reinvent themselves."

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.