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Guardium Acquired by IBM

Adrian Lane November 29, 2009 4 Comments

Tel Aviv newspaper TheMarker reports that IBM will complete its acquisition of database activity monitoring company Guardium Monday, November 30th. While it is early, and I have yet to confirm the number with anyone at IBM or Guardium, the sale price is being listed at $225 million. This is by far the largest acquisition in the DAM space to date! I had estimated Guardium’s revenue for 2008 at $35-38M, and $38-40M for 2009. If the $225M acquisition price is accurate, at a standard 5x multiple, it would suggest that they were closer to $45M. But my guess is, with an impressive customer list like Citigroup and BofA, the bookings multiple is a little higher than standard. Rumors have been circulating for over a year that large firms have approached Guardium and Imperva about being acquired. These two firms are the unquestioned leaders in database activity monitoring, and for larger technology firms looking to fill gaps in their data security portfolio, these discussions made sense. IBM has been interested in DAM for many years, with multiple divisions playing footsie with different DAM vendors, but most didn’t fit IBM’s business. Guardium is one of the only firms still standing with a mainframe monitoring solution, which is a major prerequisite for much of IBM’s customer base. From the IBM perspective, the functionality makes sense and fits well into some of their existing security products. From an architectural standpoint, integration (as opposed to just sharing data and events) will be a challenge. I do not know which section of IBM will own this product or how it will be sold, but those are certainly questions I will ask when I get the chance. Last year around this time I predicted, based upon the harsh economic climate, that several vendors in this space would be acquired or out of business by now. Tizor was sold for $3.1 million, and as predicted the remnants of IPLocks disappeared. From the rumors I thought Guardium would be next and it was. I was dead wrong, though, in that many security vendors – such as in the SIEM space – were seeing revenue growth despite the miserable economic climate. The impressive $225M figure really surprised me. I had estimated the DAM market at $70-80 million last year, the wide range resulting from the many smaller firms with unknown revenue. For 2009, I estimate revenue has climbed into the $85M range, and that’s with fewer players overall. Where does that leave us? With Guardium & Tizor now sold to IBM & Netezza respectively, and the list of viable competitors having thinned out, I think that Imperva, Sentrigo, AppSec, and Secerno just became a little more valuable. I hate to call it validation, but this is the first time we have seen a big dollar buy. There remain a lot of firms like EMC, McAfee, Oracle, Symantec, and others who would really benefit from gaining DAM technology, so I expect additional acquisitions in the next 6 months. I spoke with some security product vendors who are building their own DAM variants in house, with anticipated launch this coming year. Still others, like Fortinet, launched a DAM product based upon a combination of in house product development in conjunction licensed code. Rich and I still consider DAM more a collection of markets and tools than a single market, but regardless, IBM is betting on the value DAM can provide their customers. I must add a personal note regarding this sale, having competed against the Guardium product and team head to head for four years. In 2004, I thought they had a terrible product. I used to tell them as much, which made me a very popular guy! I also remember a particular ISSA meeting where the Guardium presenter was ridiculed mercilessly by the audience for what was perceived as a failed implementation (honestly, I was not one of the hecklers!), but it showed that at that time security professionals did not believe Guardium’s proxy model would work. But Guardium is the only vendor to have truly focused on their monitoring product and offer significant improvement quarter over quarter, year over year. By 2006 they were consistently beating their competition in head to head evaluations of database activity monitoring. While they started with a product that was barely good enough, I have to applaud their staff for being responsive to market trends, for consistently addressing customer complaints, and for systematically outstripping most of their competition in performance and out-of-the-box functionality. I still think the product is hard to deploy and the appliance based model has scalability and large deployment manageability issues, but hey, no one’s perfect. They have stayed focused better than anyone else in this space, and most importantly, have the most tenacious and omnipresent sales force I have ever seen in a small company. This is a personal ‘Congratulations!’ to the Guardium team on a job well done! You guys deserve it. Share:

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