HPE acquires behavioral security analytics firm Niara
Niara's behavior analytics software will be integrated with HPE Aruba's ClearPass network security portfolio. — HPE announced Wednesday that it has acquired Niara, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based behavioral security analytics firm.
Context & Ripple Effects
Niara lands at HPE two years after HP's $3B acquisition of Aruba Networks, which gave the company a wireless LAN business and the ClearPass access-control portfolio that now serves as the integration point for behavioral analytics. The timing matters: within weeks of this deal, Palo Alto Networks paid $105M for LightCyber's behavioral attack detection, making user-and-entity analytics the contested layer of 2017's security M&A market.
For HPE, Niara is the first of a string of security purchases routed through Aruba — a pattern that later produced the reported $500M Axis Security deal, also executed via the Aruba subsidiary.
First-order effects
- ClearPass customers get behavioral analytics folded into their existing network access control purchase, turning Aruba from an access vendor into one that also flags anomalous user and device behavior.
- Palo Alto Networks' LightCyber buy and Juniper's Cyphort acquisition put direct competitors on the same machine-learning detection path, so HPE's differentiation depends on how tightly Niara binds to Aruba's installed base.
Second-order effects
- Standalone behavioral analytics startups lose their most natural exit path as networking giants build the capability in-house, pushing remaining independents toward the firewall and endpoint vendors still shopping.
- Bundling analytics into access control pressures pure-play security analytics vendors on price, since buyers can now get baseline anomaly detection as part of a network refresh rather than a separate line item.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Niara in 2017, then Silver Peak's SD-WAN tools and Zerto's data-recovery software later — HPE is assembling security around the network edge rather than selling it as a standalone product, making the access layer the default enforcement point.
- That consolidation points toward a market where security capability is priced into connectivity deals, shrinking the addressable market for independent analytics vendors and concentrating M&A among infrastructure incumbents.
The trend: Network infrastructure vendors are absorbing behavioral security analytics into their own platforms, converting access control from a gatekeeping function into a detection one.