FireEye Acquires Security Orchestration Company Invotas

Just a few weeks after its last big buy, FireEye is at it again, saying Monday that it has acquired security orchestration and automation company Invotas.

The deal was announced at the company's Momentum 2016 sales kickoff event in Las Vegas this week, though terms of the deal, which has already closed, were not disclosed.

Invotas, based in Alexandria, Va., offers a solution for an organization to orchestrate and automate threat intelligence findings across an environment. The technology will be tucked into FireEye's existing platform, allowing the security vendor to build a single-pane-of-glass management console from which partners and customers can orchestrate and automate threat intelligence and incident response, as well as integrate with third-party vendors.

[Related: FireEye Acquires Threat-Intelligence Analyst iSight]

The acquisition comes on the heels of Milpitas, Calif.-based FireEye’s acquisition of threat intelligence company iSight Partners in January.

As FireEye continues to expand its platform-based approach, CEO Dave DeWalt said in a keynote address at the event that a single-pane-of-glass management solution was the ’missing piece’ in the company’s portfolio. He said Invotas will provide a ’new view’ of the FireEye platform.

That type of single-pane-of-glass solution, which would allow a technician to check one screen for intelligence and analytics from multiple devices is a big win for partners, said Nick Giampietro, sales director at Babylon, N.Y.-based G-Net Solutions.

"That's been the holy grail for years," Giampietro said.

In an interview with CRN at the event, DeWalt said that the acquisitions of Invotas and iSight show a strategic push by FireEye to have more of an "open connector model." He said the purchase of Invotas, in particular, will allow for more integration with other vendors and technologies. For partners, that push is a win, he said, as it allows them to customize integrated multivendor offerings for their customers under the Invotas console.

Customers with solutions from multiple vendors want to be able to roll up that data into a single pane of glass in order to make sense of it, instead of taking a "stovepipe" approach, Allen Lerner, federal account manager at Hanover, Md.-based ClearShark, said. As a partner, Lerner said that type of management solution creates a powerful story to tell to customers.

"It's unbelievable," Lerner said. "That's the most powerful thing coming out of this event. I'm very excited to learn more about it."