Splunk to acquire Phantom Cyber Corporation
Data analytics service provider Splunk Inc. recently announced a definitive agreement to purchase security company Phantom Cyber Corporation for approximately $350 million. The acquisition is anticipated to close during the first half of this year.
Phantom Cyber was founded in 2014 and is known for its security, orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) capabilities. SOAR platforms are intended to improve the efficiency of operations by automating tasks, orchestrating workflows, bettering collaboration, and enabling organizations to respond to incidents at machine speed. The company has raised approximately $22.7 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
“Sourabh Satish and I founded Phantom to give SOC analysts a powerful advantage over their adversaries, a way to automatically and quickly resolve threats,” said Oliver Friedrichs, founder and CEO, Phantom, in a statement. “Combining SOAR with the industry’s leading big data platform is a revolutionary advance for security and IT teams and will further cut down the time it takes them to eliminate threats and keep the business running. We are thrilled to empower Splunk customers to solve these important challenges.”
As part of the acquisition, Splunk customers will be able to use Phantom Cyber’s technology as part of their security operations center (SOC) platform. According to the company, the combination of these technologies will enable security operations (SecOps) teams to advance cyber defense and reduce organizational risk using analytics-driven security, respond faster, and reduce staffing and skills challenges.
This isn’t the first time Splunk has made headway in the security market. Splunk purchased machine learning and behavioral analytics company Caspida for approximately $190 million in 2015. The company said the combination of Caspida and its technology would help better detect advanced and insider threats. The company also acquired Rocana and Signal Sense of October last year.
“Phantom’s employees and technology significantly expand and strengthen Splunk’s vision for the security nerve center and for business revolution through IT,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Splunk. “Splunk is committed to continuously pushing the limits of technology to help our customers get the answers they need from their data. I am very excited to reach this definitive agreement with Phantom and look forward to welcoming the team to Splunk.”
