Latest FireEye Acquisition to Beef up Mandiant Advantage Platform

The latest FireEye acquisition is Respond Software, a cybersecurity investigation automation company, for $186 million in cash and stock.

FireEye also announced a $400 million strategic investment led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities. The funding will support strategic growth initiatives, including this acquisition.

The acquisition opens new market opportunities to deliver extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities to more customers. Additionally, it adds more capabilities to FireEye’s Mandiant Advantage platform.

The latest FireEye acquisition closed on Wednesday.

FireEye’s Peter Bailey

Peter Bailey is FireEye‘s executive vice president and COO. He said XDR is a fast-growing security technology that addresses multiple customer challenges. Those include staffing shortages and connecting disparate systems to identify the weak signals of an attack.

“The integration of the cloud-based AI technology from Respond into our controls-agnostic Mandiant Advantage platform means that we can deliver XDR to almost any customer,” he said.

There will be a lot of opportunity for partners to enable their customers with XDR technology, Bailey said.

Respond Analyst Key Component

Respond Analyst is an XDR engine that accelerates cyber investigation and response. This technology will become a key part of the Mandiant Advantage platform.

“The acquisition automates our existing competitive advantage by bringing a machine-based Mandiant expert into a customer’s environment to manage L1 SOC response and workflows,” Bailey said. “The XDR engine will be part of our Mandiant Advantage platform, along with our intelligence and validation solutions in the same portal. This will offer customers a compelling dashboard to proactively test as well as respond to attacks on their organization.”

Opportunities for Joint Partners

For the immediate future it’s business as usual for Respond’s partners, Bailey said.

“We will continue to sell the solution as we integrate it into our products,” he said. “We see a lot of opportunities for our joint partners and will have more to share about the future of the partner program as we move past the acquisition.”

“Respond’s product dramatically reduces time spent investigating false positives,” said Mike Armistead, Respond’s CEO prior to the acquisition. “Now coupled with Mandiant’s world-class threat intelligence and incident response expertise feeding our models, customers can be confident the most up-to-date and relevant attack tactics and techniques are recognized and appropriately escalated. This results in more coverage, faster resolution of incidents, and ultimately, less risk at lower cost.”