I read about FireEye’s security breach a couple of days ago. I looked at a five year graph and see that FireEye’s stock price is almost exactly still where it was five years ago. It’s never gone much above and never much below. Same market cap. And I wonder why any responsible company would still rely on a static old-line security company like FireEye, when there are companies like Crowdstrike around.
Saul,
I have a little insight on FireEye since I worked there 7 years as a QA Director (before I retired in 2019). In 2016 I told the CEO Kevin Mandia in a small meeting that we must begin a move to the cloud immediately. I believe he was a bit taken back by my assertiveness as we were an appliance company at the time. The cloud initiative proceeded without me (sigh…) but was embroiled in politics and IMHO people assigned, dropped the ball a couple times. I am being as polite as I can be as I liked all the folks including CEO Kevin Mandia.
I disagree with your ‘reasons’ that FEYE is a static old line company. For years it has had cloud services and has a very good AI engine in the cloud and in the endpoint. This notion of machine learning across all the security incidents of all customers in the world is nothing new. FEYE has been doing this since 2012. FEYE has very good security detection as confirmed with many outside 3rd party assessments. I have made only a modest investment in CRWD because I have struggled to understand the CRWD success formula (maybe I am too close). But for sure it is real as the results speak for themselves. I believe what CRWD has achieved is due to their initial platform being developed on the cloud (and not ported into the cloud like FEYE has tried for endpoint management). The FEYE strategy was to create a platform in the cloud, but it failed on execution pure and simple. Now that CRWD’s platform is there in the cloud, it has effectively expanded its product offering by the Columbus method, landing and conquering. And its marketing has been most effective eating Symantec’s lunch as they have declined to “a static old school security company”. FEYE has a cloud presence now but is behind the 8 ball compared to CRWD. I would not count FEYE out, but they have probably too much ground to catch up to ever become a threat to CRWD.
In regards to the FEYE security breech, how embarrassing even if it was a nation state actor attack. This can only severely hurt FEYE’s reputation. From the press release I read, the attack appears was against a division of the company that it acquired in 2019, Verodin, Inc. The Verodin focus was on red team, blue team customer training exercises.
One lesson here is that our country should never underestimate the capabilities of the adversarial nation states to execute an effective cyber attack when needed. There is a daily cyber war underway and few people realize it potency. I lived it, it is real. There is always a new trick that can bring a computer down whether you are new school or not.
-zane