Is Dell Exiting the Cybersecurity Market?

By Steve Morgan, founder and CEO at Cybersecurity Ventures.

What a difference a year makes.  Consider: Secureworks was the first tech IPO of the year and made a lot of media noise but has come up short of expectations (so far); Sonicwall is going away as part of the Dell Software Group sell-off; NTT Data recently agreed to buy Dell’s IT services business which takes Dell’s information security services off the table; RSA remains solid — but it doesn’t belong to Dell (yet) — which is still trying to get its finances in place to complete the EMC acquisition.

What is Dell thinking?

One can only speculate that the software group sale — which is estimated to fetch $2 billion, and the IT services business sale to NTT for $3 billion, are part of Dell’s grand scheme to finance their whopping $67 billion purchase of EMC Corp.

A year ago — when Cybersecurity Ventures reported the cybersecurity market reached $75 billion in 2015 and was expected to post revenues of $170 billion by 2020 (based on consolidated IT analyst reports) — it seemed as if Dell were bringing a canon to a knife fight.  And now – with the updated prediction of $1 trillion in cyber spending up for grabs between 2017 and 2021, Dell’s security efforts may equate to whipping out a pocket knife in a gun fight.