Google Acquires Siemplify
Google announced this week that it has acquired privately held Siemplify, an Israeli cybersecurity startup. Siemplify has developed a leading security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform. Terms were not formally disclosed by the companies, but press reports put the price at $500 million. That would be in line with what Palo Alto Networks (Nasdaq: PANW) paid for SOAR vendor Demisto in 2019. M&A activity has been brisk in the SOAR market and Siemplify was one of few remaining standalone SOAR vendors. Others include D3, Exabeam, and Swimlane.
In a blog post, Google announced its intentions for the acquired technology:
“Siemplify allows Security Operation Center analysts to manage their operations from end-to-end, respond to cyber threats … The technology also helps improve SOC performance by reducing caseloads, raising analyst productivity, and creating better visibility across workflows.
"We plan to invest in SOAR capabilities with Siemplify’s cloud services as our foundation and the team’s talent leading the way. Our intention is to integrate Siemplify’s capabilities into Chronicle in ways that help enterprises modernize and automate their security operations.”
The Chronicle of Google Cloud
Chronicle is Google’s global security telemetry platform. The technology was developed by Google’s parent company Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL) as one of its experimental projects. In 2019, Chronicle, which had become an Alphabet subsidiary, was spun into Google Cloud. The rationale was that the trajectories of Chronicle and Google Cloud were increasingly converging.
The Chronicle portfolio includes a threat intel feed and VirusTotal. SOAR technology has been an obvious gap in the Chronicle offerings, and to breach it Chronicle had an integration partnership with Siemplify. Given this week’s announcement, we can assume that arrangement was going well and that Siemplify’s partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure will lapse.
Google’s security portfolio is built on scale and global visibility into threats and remediation, and the addition of SOAR technology fits with that strategy. Google made a very public commitment last summer to invest aggressively in cybersecurity technology. The company estimated it would make a $10 billion investment over the next five years to strengthen cybersecurity. This announcement is an early indication that 2022 will be a busy year for Google’s security business.
