In a world where mergers and acquisitions are commonplace, only a handful, like us, have steadfastly resisted this temptation. Why are we obsessive about not engaging in mergers and acquisitions? Is it not the best way to evolve alongside the ever-changing market?
Blame it on the rapidly evolving tech landscape—companies always tend to have a fear of missing out on critical technologies. If you couple this anxiety with make-or-buy decisions, they prefer buying over making.
This short-term thinking usually does not consider the complex integrations of code bases. Imagine that you find a rocket engine powerful enough to put humans on Pluto, you also learn about a sophisticated infotainment system for cars, and you are in the business of running a train. Now consider integrating these features as a single bundled offering and trying to sell it in your market. Absurd, right?
Riding on the sunk-cost fallacy, these companies significantly shell out cash to build complex workflows, getting invested in integrating the alien code base so much that they ignore usability. The acquired company may carry a lot of hidden workflows and integrations susceptible to supply chain attacks.
Very few companies like us offer broad capabilities through a single interface, which enhances product stability and enriches the user experience.
We believe that great companies invest in things that they can control. Apple’s founder Steve Jobs said, “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
Because of the hype cycle generated by the market, companies might mindlessly invest in leading-edge technologies without having an articulated vision of what they intend to do with them, making their balance sheets unsustainable, especially during a recession. We are not swayed by these hype cycles. We withstand stormy days and provide customers with uninterrupted services. As a testament to this fact, we announced a small business emergency assistance program for companies hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
When a company acquires another solution to meet the market needs, we usually find that the company outsources its thinking to the acquired team and stumbles on understanding its core offering. It then hampers the domain knowledge they would have gotten had they made the solution themselves. Since they have complex workflows and alien code bases, it becomes herculean to fix bugs or glitches. Rome was not built in a day and definitely not using shortcuts.
Since we develop new technology (instead of acquiring it), we deploy the solution as a pilot across the enterprise. This will generate meaningful insights about the product from a workforce perspective. When launched into the market, our product support will be aware of all possible root cause analyses of the problems that our customers might encounter.
Building trumps buying if a company aspires to be a long-term player. We are passionate product makers and have equipped ourselves with patience and endurance amidst the rapidly evolving market.
By painstakingly building solutions and serving customers for more than a decade and a half, we have witnessed explosive growth and permanence in the market. We saw the hay days of desktop and modern management and now find ourselves at the cusp of providing holistic security for enterprise endpoints. Along with Microsoft, we are the only other vendor featured in Gartner’s® Magic Quadrant™ that does not engage in acquisitions.
