Splunk Boosts Cybersecurity Profile with $190 Million Caspida Buy

Data analytics specialist Splunk (SPLK) said it will pay $190 million to acquire Palo Alto, CA-based startup Caspida in a cash and stock deal that bolsters its cybersecurity profile and may help it to win new customers.

Caspida, which similar to Splunk specializes in machine learning and behavioral analytics, concentrates on cloud cybersecurity with automatic threat detection spanning mobile endpoints, SaaS solutions, corporate networks and the like.

Under the terms of the agreement, Splunk will acquire all of Caspida’s outstanding stock for $127 million in cash and $63 million in restricted Splunk securities.

Splunk said the new combination of the companies’ technologies will unify breach response with breach detection, providing a platform for automated detection leveraging machine learning to stifle insider and external attackers. To get there, Splunk plans to integrate Caspida’s software into its own behavioral analytics platform to craft custom solutions for enterprise customers.

Monzy Merza, Splunk Chief Security Evangelist, said in a blog post that the acquisition gives the developer additional security credentials gained from Caspida’s data science techniques.

“All recent high-profile breaches have a common denominator – the attacks happen with compromised credentials. So it would seem, if the account usage is tracked, it is possible to detect and disrupt many of the attacks – especially the ones we read in the news,” he said.

“Caspida includes machine learning, semantic classification, kill chain detection, graph/link analysis and threat scoring,” said Merza. “With Splunk’s emerging role as the nerve center for security, this new combination increases the insights organizations gain as well as their capacity to detect threats and orchestrate and automate responses,” he said.

“Splunk security customers will benefit from Caspida’s ability to use these data science techniques to detect known, hidden, unknown and advanced threats from external and internal attackers,” he said.

Splunk chief financial officer Dave Conte said the Caspida purchase won’t contribute to sales until next year.

“Operationally, we plan to spend this year integrating the technology and expect it to contribute to top line revenues next year,” he said.