FireEye Expands Data Management Capabilities with X15 Software Buy

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Cybersecurity company FireEye has acquired privately held X15 Software and its next-generation big data platform for $15 million in equity and $5 million in cash.

FireEye’s Grady Summers

Grady Summers, FireEye’s chief technology officer, tells Channel Partners the acquisition of X15 helps FireEye accelerate the development of its Helix security operations platform with more big-data and analytics capabilities, plus the ability to ingest new sources of data.

“For our partners, Helix provides a massive opportunity to centralize their clients’ security operations and provide services around the deployment and management of Helix, while upgrading the effectiveness of every solution they’re using today,” he said.

X15 will help FireEye leverage data at scale and provide meaningful analytics, Summers said.

“What makes FireEye unique is our knowledge of threat actors and their capabilities, and how we’re able to use this knowledge to build products that identify and mitigate attacks before they impact our customers,” he said. “We’ve found that X15’s technology lets us apply what we know at massive scale, speed and flexibility. Our partners will begin to see benefits in terms of scale, cost and performance of FireEye solutions, on a very aggressive integration timeline.”

X15’s partners include such companies as Cloudera, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and MapR.

“Qualified X15 partners will be invited to join the FireEye partner program — FireEye Fuel,” Summers said.

“We founded X15 Software to help organizations get more value out of the massive data they were generating on a daily basis, and very quickly we saw how impactful our technology could be in the security space,” said Val Rayzman, X15’s CEO prior to the acquisition. “By coming together with FireEye, we can help build a security platform that uses big data, threat intelligence and analytics to keep customers secure.”