Will FireEye Be Acquired in 2017?

Piper Jaffray recently conducted a survey to ascertain the sales performance of leading security vendors, particularly Symantec (SYMC), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Proofpoint (PFPT), and FireEye (FEYE) in 2017. Among these security vendors, FireEye faltered the most.

Citing this survey, Barrons blog stated: “Resellers said demand for FireEye has gotten worse, and they are no longer leading with FireEye products for advanced threat protection.”

FireEye has already been targeted as a potential takeover target due to steep falls in its share price combined with its attractive offerings over the years.

With the exception of FireEye, resellers were bullish for rest of the security vendors, with Palo Alto topping lists. IDC results show that “Palo Alto has taken over the #1 position in the security market [comanding a] 17.1% share.”

The above chart shows the YoY (year-over-year) performance of the leading network security vendors, providing an insight into which of them currently has the powerful momentum. As you can see, Fortinet increased the most among peers, followed by Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, Dell, and Cisco Systems (CSCO).

But competition is bound to increase among these vendors as they fight for larger market shares. FireEye will thus have to muscle up to compete with Fortinet and Palo Alto in network security.