FireEye sells its products business to Symphony technology

FireEye has agreed to sell its products business to a consortium led by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for $1.2 billion in all cash deal and will bring the company’s product portfolio under control of the same private equity group that is purchasing McAfee’s enterprise business.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based platform security vendor said its high-growth threat intelligence and incident response services business will continue to operate as a publicly traded business under the Mandiant Solutions banner. In addition to purchasing the company’s network, email, endpoint and cloud security portfolio, private equity firm STG also acquired the FireEye name.

STG has been aggressive into the space of cybersecurity from past one year by purchasing Bedford, Mass.-based encryption pioneer RSA in September 2020 for $2.08 billion and agreeing in March 2021 to buy San Jose, Calif.-based McAfee’s enterprise business for $4 billion.

FireEye’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the deal unlocks its “high-growth” Mandiant business, allowing it to stand alone as a separate business running incident response and security testing. The move to split the two companies comes almost a decade after FireEye acquired Mandiant, and made Mandia chief executive.

After closing, we will be able to concentrate exclusively on scaling our intelligence and frontline expertise through the Mandiant Advantage program, while the FireEye Products business will be able to prioritize investment on its cloud-first security product portfolio,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said in a statement.