Broadcom Sells Accenture Symantec Security Services Biz

Just months after paying $10.7 billion for Symantec’s enterprise security business, Broadcom is selling a piece of it — Symantec’s Cyber Security Services unit — to Accenture for an undisclosed amount. Just months after paying $10.7 billion for Symantec’s enterprise security business, Broadcom is selling a piece of it — Symantec’s Cyber Security Services unit — to Accenture for an undisclosed amount. Symantec’s Cyber Security Services business has 300 employees. Its portfolio includes global threat monitoring and analysis via a network of security operation centers, threat intelligence, and incident response services. It has six security operations centers located in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Singapore, and Japan. Additionally, its cloud-based managed security services platform provides technical and adversary threat intelligence through a customizable portal. Accenture, which provides a slew of consulting and IT services, says it will use the Symantec business unit to boost its existing managed security services. “We’ve followed Symantec’s CSS business for quite some time,” said Harpreet Sidhu, managing director and managed security services lead at Accenture Security. “But over the past few years, they’ve gone through their own transformation and really gone to this cloud-native based, analytical, and differentiated platform that gives clients the ability to get services very quickly turned on and deployed” so that they can better detect and respond to threats across their environments. “The Symantec CSS business gives us a platform to start to tie all of these [managed security services] together,” he added. “So we as look to the future, and how our customers are asking us to bring services to them, it’s a consistent and cloud-native experience for customers” and it also includes industry-specific threat information tailored to Accenture’s customers. “We know when a client is a bank, and what the key threats banks face versus health care, or an oil and gas operation, or a retail client,” Sidhu said. This is Accenture’s 10th security acquisition in four years. Some of the more recent ones include Deja vu Security, iDefense, Maglan, Redcore, Arismore, and FusionX. In its 2019 fiscal year alone, Accenture spent about $1.2 billion on 33 acquisitions. “It’s important for Accenture to continue to invest and make sure we’re relevant to our clients, which requires investments both organic and inorganic,” Sidhu said. Broadcom didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story. But John Lioanto, VP and GM of Symantec’s Cyber Security business, said Broadcom, which closed on the Symantec acquisition in November, “made clear they are a software company, and not a services company. We knew that they would move us off to a strategic solution very quickly. They expressed early on the desire to be sure we went to a good, strategic fit.” The business unit had a long list of “potential suitors,” Lioanto said, and “No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 on the list were Accenture. So for us it worked really, really well.” The companies expect the deal to close in March.