> Proofpoint claims around 24% of the email security market
Proofpoint is the clear number two, but Microsoft always sits behind Proofpoint (and Mimecast, IronPort, etc.). They're also always in front of Abnormal and other API-only options. Every big company has E5 with Defender for Office 365 on their email, and the rest either still have E5 or they have EOP.
> That’s one interpretation of events.
In 2017 EPP and EDR were distinct categories, and CrowdStrike had a big internal initiative (driven top-down by Kurtz, but managed by a PM director under Rod Murchison) to merge them, while Cylance and others that had separate SKUs for each area worked to keep them apart. CrowdStrike was more effective.
I mentioned this because it wasn't just a natural market convergence; B2B companies spend absurd amounts of money with the Gartners and Forresters of the world to align their products with line items in budgets. It's capitalism all the way down.
Not speculating on anything here. I was at or worked closely with all of the companies mentioned in both posts.
You like to make absolute statements like “always”, but I know of large organizations (Fortune 500) that use Proofpoint, but not Microsoft email security. And in endpoint, there are shops that license defender as part of an EA, but don’t use it - of course, those seats go into the Forrester figures that Microsoft likes to tout.
Sure, I can enumerate the handful of the Fortune 500 that don't use Microsoft. Palo Alto Networks, for example, has TAP sitting in front of Google. In PANW's case it's because of a broader partnership Nikesh put together with Google in 2018, which also involved moving from AWS to GCP. This is stupendously uncommon, though.
If you were to look through the System -> Inbound Mail settings for every PPS customer, you'd find a sea of x.mail.protection.outlook.com, some on-prem Exchange servers, and practically nothing else. I'm comfortable with "always" as a description of this state of affairs, but you do you.
Proofpoint is the clear number two, but Microsoft always sits behind Proofpoint (and Mimecast, IronPort, etc.). They're also always in front of Abnormal and other API-only options. Every big company has E5 with Defender for Office 365 on their email, and the rest either still have E5 or they have EOP.
> That’s one interpretation of events.
In 2017 EPP and EDR were distinct categories, and CrowdStrike had a big internal initiative (driven top-down by Kurtz, but managed by a PM director under Rod Murchison) to merge them, while Cylance and others that had separate SKUs for each area worked to keep them apart. CrowdStrike was more effective.
I mentioned this because it wasn't just a natural market convergence; B2B companies spend absurd amounts of money with the Gartners and Forresters of the world to align their products with line items in budgets. It's capitalism all the way down.
Not speculating on anything here. I was at or worked closely with all of the companies mentioned in both posts.