The Security Stack Is Collapsing (And That’s a Good Thing)

Fragmentation is nothing new for the cybersecurity industry. Novel categories emerge with every evolution of attacker behavior and infrastructure, sending ambitious vendors scurrying to fill the market gaps. The result? A glut of overlapping tools and overburdened security teams trying to stitch them all together.

However, as the Bob Dylan song goes, “the times, they are a-changing.” The reason, according to cybersecurity industry leader and Anomali Senior Advisor Christian Karam, is artificial intelligence (AI), which is accelerating a long-overdue market and tool consolidation.  

"We're seeing 23 to 24 security sub-segments collapsing into 12 to 14," he said. Moreover, he added, this isn’t a sign of market failure. It’s a sign of maturity.

Unifying Function, Not Just Form

In 2024, the cybersecurity market saw a significant spike in high-profile mergers and acquisitions. This includes Cisco’s $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, Palo Alto Networks’ purchase of IBM’s QRadar assets, and the merger of LogRhythm and Exabeam.

This consolidation extends beyond the market. It’s about the need to correlate “what’s out there” with “what’s in here.” It’s about breaking down silos.  

The complexity of today’s threat landscape requires speed, context, and coordination. In their need to accelerate security outcomes, buyers are gravitating toward platforms that remove friction by unifying visibility and response. AI can deliver these integrated outcomes — but only when tools work together.

The industry and product trends are enabling security teams to reduce tool sprawl by deploying unified, AI-powered platforms like Anomali. Customers are reporting real-world outcomes like nearly a 90% drop in critical incidents, 50% time savings, and full deployment in 90 days. 

What Successful Vendors Understand: Gravity

Christian says that the vendors who will win in today’s market will do so because they control three kinds of gravity:

1. Data gravity: Owning or enriching the key data sources needed for detection and response ‍
2. Workflow gravity: Living inside the systems and processes teams already use ‍
3. Strategic/account gravity: Delivering enough value to become core to how customers operate

These aren’t just business advantages — they’re product mandates. In an AI-powered future, platforms that can correlate telemetry, automate action, and surface business-aligned insights will outperform fragmented point solutions.

Shifting the Boundaries Between Products and Services

AI doesn’t just speed up detection and response. It blurs the traditional lines between SaaS products and managed services. An intelligent platform can now deliver outcomes that previously required expert intervention. That changes buyer expectations. It also resets the go-to-market playbook.

At Anomali, this shift is already underway. Our AI capabilities enable the platform to correlate signals across vast telemetry, enrich alerts in real time, and even suggest likely root causes and response actions — reducing the manual lift for security teams. With agentic AI woven throughout the platform, security operations teams can move faster and smarter, whether they're investigating suspicious behavior, automating triage, or aligning detection to business risk. This redefines what "as-a-service" means and accelerates time to value — not just for security operations center (SOC) teams, but for the business as a whole.

Security vendors that lean into AI-native architecture, outcome-first design, and frictionless integration will rise to the top, according to Christian. The rest? They’ll either get absorbed or left behind.

How Anomali is Building Toward a Unified Future

Anomali was designed from the ground up as an AI-native platform that unifies security information and event management (SIEM), threat intelligence, and extended telemetry into a single, scalable data lake. Unlike traditional SIEMs or bolt-on threat intel feeds, Anomali delivers context-rich insights in real time — enabling faster decisions, fewer false positives, and operational alignment across IT and security.

We continue to empower SOC teams to investigate, prioritize, and act to neutralize attacks before they gain traction. And because the Anomali data lake consolidates internal and external telemetry into one AI-powered foundation, teams no longer have to choose between visibility and performance.

Want to see how Anomali is building for a unified future? Schedule a demo.

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