This is quite a lot of money and Kevin Mandia obviouly made some right decisions in his life. But what is Google really after here? The employees (must be quite flutering to be valued at 10 million on average), the products, the marketshare?
A typical consulting acquisition for someone like Accenture could be $250-500k per head. I realize this firm is deeply specialized and at the top of their industry, but it is a massive premium.
Google is coming from ~last place on enterprise+gov security relative to Microsoft and Amazon, which is maybe 75% of the market (and ignoring the Splunks of the world), and the ability to grow there requires real skills in services. Mandiant, in turn, is in a league of their own here, in brand if not practice. More about amazing IR/hunt/etc, vs say SIEM configuration, so a lot of line blurring & potential skillset clash for achieving their value, but still. Google+MS internal security teams are likewise trusted, but only Microsoft's are considered collaborative, so Google's are ~useless from a services gap perspective. So from a strategic view, this jumps them from last place to ~first. (And Microsoft's main value in buying would have been just to prevent AWS/Google from doing so.)
So as long as they have amazing handcuffs on the CEO, it's probably more like $1M per employee and $100M+ for the CEO (if real handcuffs) + brand.
An independent Mandiant is amazing for the ecosystem, but so goes. Over all though, probably still net win for folks involved + community - Google getting even more serious here is great!
It’s funny / depressing that Microsoft is not in last place given the frequency, severity and rank embarrassment-level of the slew of recent Azure vulnerabilities that have turned up.
