Google's Wiz wager
The US$32 billion acquisition, Google's biggest ever, may help it take the fight to Amazon and Microsoft in the enterprise space.
The news overnight that Google will snap up Israeli-American cybersecurity firm Wiz for an eye-popping USD32 billion ($50.3 billion) in its biggest acquisition ever is being viewed as the starting gun on a new era of Big Tech M&A activity after a prolonged deep freeze.
But there’s also a more interesting corporate story here. In brutally simple terms, Google just paid tens of billions of dollars for a functional enterprise sales team.
Google's cloud business has been the perennial bronze medallist behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure for years now. Google has world-class engineering talent, but it has struggled to make real headway in the enterprise space, where Amazon and Microsoft run circles around it. Nailing cybersecurity is a big piece of that puzzle.
Selling to enterprise is very rarely a competition over who has the sexiest tech. Instead, it's about relationships, trust and skilfully navigating some of the most byzantine procurement processes you could possibly imagine. This is true for most B2B software sales but is particularly acute in cybersecurity, where the consequences of failure are catastrophic.
