McAfee and FireEye merge to form Trellix to fight cyber crime

With about 4,500 employees across the world, the new company is valued around $1.7bn and sees the Middle East as a key growth market

The global cybersecurity market size is forecast to grow to $345.4 billion by 2026, Statista reported. Reuters

US cybersecurity companies McAfee Enterprise and FireEye have merged to form a “stronger entity”, named Trellix, to thwart cyber attacks and fight sophisticated criminals, the new company’s chief executive Bryan Palma said.

Trellix will be a part of California-based private equity firm Symphony Technology Group that has a portfolio of more than 35 global companies.

The new company is valued about $1.7 billion. With about 4,500 employees around the world, it has more than 40,000 customers globally.

The merger was originally announced in October, but the new brand identity and other details were made public on Wednesday.

Middle East customers are very conscious about cyber security and this market will a key growth area for us ... we are also looking to have good business from Asia, Europe and the US market

Bryan Palma,
chief executive of Trellix

Trellix will deliver “XDR [extended detection and response] capabilities to organisations through machine learning and automation”, Mr Palma told The National in an exclusive interview.

“Trellix’s XDR platform protects our customers as we bring security to life with automation, machine learning, extensible architecture and threat intelligence.”

The fresh brand identity and collaborative efforts will result in robust growth for the new company, Mr Palma said.

“Rebranding the company is a significant investment … part of the reason why we are doing it is to achieve fast growth. Going by the market trends, we aim to grow [our revenue] in double digits … we see that as an opportunity over the next couple of years,” he added.

The XDR ecosystem lets users ingest more than 600 security technologies. By providing security analysts with better insight, granting more control and delivering comprehensive threat context, it can save time and act decisively to remediate threats.

SolarWinds was among a number of companies breached in the widespread cyber attack that came to light in December 2020 after going undetected for a year. Reuters

Trellix is also looking towards going public in the coming years.

“We are highly profitable and are very well positioned. We would love to go public at the right time … but for now, we are focused on executing our strategy and delivering right security tools to our customers,” said Mr Palma, without specifying when that might occur.

Increasing complexities of cyber attacks have driven the former competitors to join forces and act as a single unit, said Mr Palma, who was previously an executive vice president of FireEye’s product division.

“We are seeing very complex attacks … this is what we saw with SolarWinds breach, Microsoft’s zero-day vulnerability and the recent Log4Jj attacks on supply chains … [and] with many people working remotely due to Covid, criminals are finding new vulnerabilities and orchestrating more sophisticated attacks.

Trellix chief executive Bryan Palma says the increasing complexities of cyber attacks have driven McAfee and FireEye to merge and act as a single unit. Image: Trellix

“We thought about the situation and also the best solutions … we really reached this position where putting McAfee and FireEye together was going to add a lot of synergy to our portfolio and Trellix came out of it.”

The company aims to offer both in-premise and cloud security solutions to its customers.

From an investment perspective, the company’s strong focus will be on artificial intelligence and machine learning, said Mr Palma.

“We are moving the industry from detection and response perspective to an immediate automated remediation,” he added.

To spread the word about the new brand, Trellix will be “investing a lot” in running media campaigns across different platforms, he said.

The global cybersecurity market size is forecast to grow to $345.4bn by 2026, a jump of more than 58.5 per cent from $217.9bn last year, Statista reported.

Cyber security is the practice of protecting computer information systems, hardware, network and confidential data from cyber attacks. An increasing awareness of cyber threats has led to a rising investment in cybersecurity infrastructure worldwide.

Mr Palma said amid the booming cybersecurity industry, the Middle East will be their key market for growth.

“Both FireEye and McAfee have done very well in the region, and we will continue to invest there.

“Middle East customers are very conscious about cyber security and this market will a key growth area for us. We are also looking to have good business from Asia, Europe and the US market.”

He also said ransomware and supply chain attacks will dominate the industry in the coming months and so protecting against threats to cryptocurrencies, social media and Internet of Things devices should also be top priorities.