FireMon Steps Up Monitoring Game With Proposed Buy Of Network Visibility Provider Lumeta

FireMon plans to purchase cyber situation awareness provider Lumeta to help security teams identify all the assets on their network and understand how they're connected.

The Overland Park, Kansas-based vendor said its intended acquisition of Somerset, N.J.-based Lumeta will help enterprises with discovering, mapping and analyzing their on-premise and cloud connections. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. By using Lumeta's technology to identify new devices, routers, and cloud connections, customers can extend the capabilities of FireMon's platform to cover previously unknown areas of exposure.

"It's a truly unique technology. It's best in class," Satin Mirchandani, FireMon's CEO, told CRN. "Channel partners should be really excited."

[RELATED: Pushing Further Into The Cloud, FireMon Acquires Security Broker FortyCloud]

FireMon launched an analysis last year of whether the company should build, buy or partner its way into the real-time network monitoring space, Mirchandani said. While that analysis was underway, Mirchandani said FireMon was approached by a banker looking to gauge the company's interest in purchasing Lumeta, which helped jumpstart negotiations.

"Their technology is well-known to our technical team," Mirchandani said. "It's proven."

FireMon and Lumeta's offerings are complementary not only from a technology standpoint, Mirchandani said, but also from a customer standpoint. Although FireMon has some federal customers, Mirchandani said the company's core business is heavily tilted from the commercial space, while Lumeta grew up in the U.S. government space before being spun out by Bell Labs (AT&T's R&D arm).

Enterprise attack surfaces can be reduced with Lumeta's technology, FireMon said, and elements and activities that represent a security risk can be exposed. The challenge of getting a handle on network activity and communication is significantly magnified for enterprises and government agencies with large-scale network operations that extend into the cloud.

Lumeta's technology will enable FireMon customers to extend security to on-premise and cloud assets that were previously unknown, ensuring the right security measures are in place in an automated way while utilizing an organization's existing security infrastructure. FireMon said this will result in significantly improved security without adding an operational burden on security teams.

Quite a bit of overlap exists between FireMon and Lumeta's solution provider communities, Mirchandani said, and bringing the two firms together should essentially double the total addressable market for channel partners of both companies.

"I don't know a single FireMon customer that couldn't use Lumeta, or vice versa," Mirchandani said.

The deal is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to be completed this quarter. FireMon intends to continue operating Lumeta as a standalone business, with Reggie Best continuing as Lumeta's president as well as joining the executive leadership team at FireMon.

FireMon intends to quickly put together a joint FireMon-Lumeta offering that can be sold through channel partners of either company, Mirchandani said.

The company hopes to have a joint partner program led by FireMon global channel chief Kurt Mills in place and active around July 1, Mirchandani said, and expects to be very active bringing an integrated product offering to market through the channel in the second half of 2018.

Lumeta was founded in 2000, and employs between 11 and 50 people, according to LinkedIn. Since then, the company has raised $21.9 million in five rounds of outside equity, according to CrunchBase, with $13 million in private equity funding coming in during October 2015.

The Lumeta announcement comes kess than two years after FireMon purchased Israel-based cloud infrastructure security broker FortyCloud to boost its capabilities across all major cloud platforms. FireMon said at the time that the deal was intended to make the transition to cloud easier for enterprise clients starting to move more of their infrastructure to the cloud.