25 June 2008

Acquisition fever won’t shrink market says Stanley

Interview: David Stanley, MD EMEA, ProofPoint

Eleanor Dallaway

Companies that exist to be acquired lose sight of their own goals, according to David Stanley, managing director of ProofPoint. And with his 12 years of experience in the industry, including time spent working for Sophos and CipherTrust, which of course was acquired by Secure Computing in the summer of 2006, it’s safe to say he has a good understanding of how the industry works.

Stanley however doesn’t deny the need for new companies emerging into the industry, despite the already crammed market space. “New companies bring in all the new innovation that the bigger companies need. That’s why companies like Cisco and Microsoft are buying new companies all the time”. 

And indeed, ProofPoint’s acquisition of Fortiva Inc, announced this week, suggests that however comprehensive a company insists that their product suite is, there’s always room for improvement. “Proofpoint email archiving perfectly complements our existing messaging solution and we believe that there is an immediate opportunity for our partners and clients to quickly incorporate the new product within their existing portfolio”, Stanley said of the acquisition.

Stanley argued that although the industry is particularly prone to acquisition, the number of players will not shrink. “When a company’s acquired, the executives often leave and then set out again on their own, building up a new company from scratch. So there will always be new, emerging businesses”.

A hard sell

And of course, there will always be a problem to solve, and customers who need a solution to these problems. “Security is a hard sell; people buy infosecurity reluctantly, not with a smile on their face. But the trick is to sell the benefits. Date leakage protection, for example, means more to people. Selling someone a product which will protect what’s important to someone is an easier sell; it’s a shift to the more important stuff”.

“There’s still reluctance from top executives to invest in security, and often, the people that set the budgets need convincing that the infosecurity measures in place are still working, and that the reason this isn’t obvious is because good security is invisible”. Stanley points out that for all the technology offerings within the industry, one of the most popular services offered is reporting – to highlight vulnerabilities to the client, and to show them what needs protecting, and where the gaps are.

Despite numerous reports stating that information security budgets are being increased, Stanley is yet to meet a buyer whose budget has not been reduced. “So where’s the gap?” he asks.

Snake oil

Frequent press exposure to large-scale infosecurity failures however, is surely enough to keep sales people in the industry busy.  “Immature sales people will use scare mongering to try and make a sale, and there’s certainly a lot of that going on at various trade shows” Stanley points out. “It’s basically creating a problem, a panic, which keeps us all in a job”.

“These same sales people will create a story to sell a product, or more frequently, will take a recent news story and sell their product as the full solution to that problem”. David Stanley maintains that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, and that instead there are various information security products available that contribute to a comprehensive defence.


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