Cybersecurity M&A deals target specific assets: a product, a pipeline, or eliminating a competitor. The real risk is acquiring unwanted baggage alongside what you actually want. Divest the peripheral stuff fast after closing to stay focused on what you bought.
Typically, or at least I've seen typically, when you're going to go make an acquisition, there's 1 or 2 reasons that you're driving this acquisition. I may want a product, I may want something in the pipeline, or quite frankly, I may want to buy out the competition. Those are things that typically drive that. So you're not going in necessarily thinking, I care about the whole entire estate. It depends. It depends. But you are going in and saying, all right, the asset that I want to buy, is it really there? Is it, does it have associated risk associated with it itself, that product or that manufacturing line or whatever it might be? So that's what you're going in to verify. Is the thing I want actually there? And then the second piece of that story is, okay, how much distractions am I buying? And it could very well be they've got a lot of risk on other parts of the business, but I don't really care about that. So part of my story might be in to make the acquisition and quickly as possible, get rid of that other stuff that I don't
