McAfee Enterprise, FireEye Emerge as Trellix, a $2 Billion Cybersecurity Titan
Omdia believes rebranding from FireEye will prove to be a "costly mistake."
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Britt Norwood is Trellix’s channel chief. He said the combination of these two companies brings an “extensive and unmatched cybersecurity portfolio to simplify threat detection, investigation and accelerate response to the threats that matter.”
“Together, we’re bringing new value to partners and are elevating our mission to create, nurture and execute mutually beneficial partner programs underpinned by our charge to build amazing solutions,” he said. “Our sales leadership and C-suite are committed to connecting with our customers, and ensuring customers receive increased value of their investments in our offerings. In the coming months, I’ll be meeting with our key partners to share our vision for the future of working together.”
Trellix is building its strengths and offerings in the enterprise, public and midmarket to unlock new opportunities for partners to grow their businesses, Norwood said.
“We’re hearing a need to grow further in services, and the need for these will never go away,” he said. “Our partners need to be watching and developing their capabilities in this area as it makes sense for their businesses, given a strong service practice is a very valuable commodity in this space. To this, we’re focused on expanding our work with MSPs and MSSPs to deploy and manage the software we’re delivering to the market. We’re building our services program to be simple, easy to onboard and become profitable – across managed, professional, and consulting.”
Trellix XDR brings a differentiated ability to secure the digital experience against cyber threats, Norwood said. It does so using threat intelligence capabilities developed through the size and diversity of Trellix’s sensor network.
“As Gartner predicts that by year-end 2027, XDR will be used by up to 40% of end user organizations, and IDC projecting the cloud-native XDR market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 89.3% through 2025, we’re ensuring our partners are equipped to utilize these trends,” he said. “We’re continuously offering new solutions leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), ML and advanced telemetry based on threat intelligence from more than 1 billion sensors across our enterprise and government customer bases. Additionally, we bring an open, interoperable platform approach to cybersecurity, allowing customers to implement the specific defensive technologies they need to protect their unique businesses and operations.”
Norwood said he’s in this role to “really double down” on growing and enriching Trellix’s partner offerings as a channel-first company.
“As we kick off 2022, integrating our portfolio across McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, and scaling with our partners is a key goal for us,” he said. “My immediate priority is to get closer to the customer. We are going to do this by growing the opportunities we provide to partners, streamlining the life cycle management process for our joint customers and making our go to market with partners simpler.”
Omdia’s Eric Parizo said a key element of the new brand is that Trellix aims to provide organizations with “living security,” but it is doing so using products that are essentially “on life support.”
“Many perceive FireEye’s flagship security appliance business as waning, following layoffs last year to reduce its R&D spending,” he said. “McAfee’s struggles are well-documented. Its endpoint and network security businesses are believed to be steady performers, but McAfee’s cloud and SaaS efforts have underperformed. And once-thriving solutions like its enterprise security manager (ESM), security information and event management (SIEM) and its OpenDXL third-party integration technology have been languishing.”
To deliver on its promise, Trellix must reinvigorate its traditional areas of strength, including endpoint (EPP/EDR/endpoint management), network security and SIEM, and reestablish its market leadership, Parizo said.
“Meanwhile, it must quickly work to overcome its challenges, such as the lack of a viable secure access service edge (SASE) offering, and the loss of most of its threat intelligence capabilities to Mandiant,” he said.
Omdia believes it is a major strategic error to separate the SSE portfolio from the rest of Trellix, Parizo said.
“In the era of digital transformation, cybersecurity for the cloud and from the cloud is an enterprise imperative,” he said. “Without the SSE technology, it becomes considerably more difficult for Trellix to weave much-needed cloud-specific capabilities into the rest of its legacy product portfolio. With this move, it is difficult to conceptualize how Trellix can effectively modernize its portfolio and successfully compete with other top-tier cybersecurity vendors. It seems likely that STG decided there was an opportunity to turn a quick profit by splitting the company, and potentially selling off the SSE company to a well-heeled suitor.”
Omdia believes it is a major strategic error to separate the SSE portfolio from the rest of Trellix, Parizo said.
“In the era of digital transformation, cybersecurity for the cloud and from the cloud is an enterprise imperative,” he said. “Without the SSE technology, it becomes considerably more difficult for Trellix to weave much-needed cloud-specific capabilities into the rest of its legacy product portfolio. With this move, it is difficult to conceptualize how Trellix can effectively modernize its portfolio and successfully compete with other top-tier cybersecurity vendors. It seems likely that STG decided there was an opportunity to turn a quick profit by splitting the company, and potentially selling off the SSE company to a well-heeled suitor.”
McAfee Enterprise and FireEye have emerged as a new company under the name Trellix. The company focuses on extended detection and response (XDR).
Trellix is the latest Symphony Technology Group (STG) entity. It stems from the previously announced merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye in October. STG acquired both companies last year.
Eric Parizo is principal analyst of Omdia’s cybersecurity operations intelligence service. (Omdia and Channel Futures share a parent company, Informa.) He said Omdia was first to predict the merger of McAfee and FireEye back in June of last year. The formal operating union between the two has been a long time coming.
Omdia’s Eric Parizo
“Trellix instantly becomes a $2 billion cybersecurity industry titan, with products that span the network, endpoint, cloud, security operations, data security and other areas,” he said. “But it also faces many questions, particularly how two companies that were each sliding into industry irrelevancy can reinvent themselves together.”
STG should launch the McAfee Enterprise secure service edge (SSE) portfolio as a separate business later this quarter. That includes cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG) and zero trust network access (ZTNA).
Ditching FireEye Brand a ‘Costly Mistake’
Omdia believes the Trellix rebrand will prove to be a “costly mistake,” Parizo said. It was “idiotic” for CEO Bryan Palma to abandon the FireEye brand.
“FireEye is an established, respected brand that has enjoyed years of success,” he said. “The FireEye name alone can open doors. Trellix, however, as a brand is highly likely to face the same challenges as Forcepoint. The Trellix name has no clear connection to security. And it doesn’t help articulate what the company actually is or does.”
Here’s how STG describes the new name:
“The new name evokes the structure of a trellis, a strong and safe framework used to support the structured growth of climbing plants and trees. Together, Trellix will deliver its brand promise to build resilient and confident organizations through living security — security technology that learns and adapts to protect operations from the most advanced threat actors.”
Benefits of XDR
Trellix’s Bryan Palma
Trellix’s XDR is designed to accelerate the effectiveness of security operations by providing customers with the capability to ingest more than 600 native and open security technologies. Therefore, analysts can save time and act decisively to remediate threats.
“As today’s organizations push to achieve digital transformation, a strong security foundation is required to ensure continued innovation, growth and resiliency,” Palma said. “Trellix’s XDR platform protects our customers as we bring security to life with automation, machine learning (ML), extensible architecture, and threat intelligence.”
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