With cyber security paramount in 2020, here is #2 of our top seven trends to watch out for.
2. Innovation will continue to solve new problems
We track over 3,500 organisations at Westcon-Comstor, and we see significant innovation in the industry. Every year at the RSA Conference we see new vendors with new solutions that address new problems.
Like in any industry, what tends to happen is the market takes time to catch up with innovation. It can take several years between a new vendor entering the market and mainstream technology adoption. Larger, established vendors focus on growing their existing business, moving to acquire the new vendors once they’ve built up a degree of market control.
One of the challenges of innovation is ensuring the feature or product won’t be overwritten or overtaken by something newer, making the initial innovator redundant.
Much innovation comes from these smaller vendors. As the footprint increases (especially in hybrid) and people adopt new use cases, more controls are needed. Many larger vendors are focused on mainstream controls, solving the larger, more prevalent problems.
The smaller vendors focus on solving new or niche problems, often just a feature in a larger product set, and their solution will eventually become a feature or be consolidated into larger platform plays.
This trend of smaller vendors entering the market, being acquired or falling by the wayside with only one or two surviving in the new market segment, looks set to continue. We’ll see more deals, mergers and acquisitions, but they’re happening less on the traditional vendor side and more on the next generation vendor side of the house.
For example, Symantec was acquired by Broadcom, showing how traditional vendors are being acquired, while the next gen hyperscalers and next gen security vendors are moving into the space. I expect these changes to continue.
The larger vendors continue to hit the ground running as soon as they acquire a business, opening opportunities for their channel. The key indicator of success is how they integrate their smaller offerings into a broader platform/solution story. I see a two-fold process: first, let’s continue to expand the market as individual product lines, then let’s cement our position as a robust, all-in security play. We see this with Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Check Point and F5. All our vendors are making these moves.
Next: 3 – IoT point solutions gain momentum, paving the way for a broader market
Missed the previous article?
