HPE splashes the cash on security firm Niara

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced yet another acquisition, this time snapping up security analytics firm Niara.

California-based Niara offers User and Entity Based Analytics (UEBA) products, which are designed to detect threats that have made their way past defences such as firewalls and into the corporate network. Its capabilities will now be integrated into the HPE Aruba ClearPass portfolio, with HPE particularly touting its capabilities for protecting the IoT.

Keerti Melkote, senior vice president and general manager of Aruba, said: "With this transaction, we are continuing to innovate at the intelligent edge with software-defined solutions to better protect our customers' businesses and IoT data."

"With over 20 billion IoT devices expected to be connected to networks by 2020, security is the number one concern for our customers. Combining Niara's next-generation behaviour analytics software with Aruba's ClearPass network security portfolio will deliver the industry's most complete visibility and attack detection system," he added.

In a blog post, Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of HPE's enterprise group, said: "We are working towards our vision of being the industry's leading provider of hybrid IT, built on the secure, next-generation, software-defined infrastructure that will run customers' data centres today, bridge to multi-cloud environments tomorrow, and power the emerging intelligent edge that will run campus, branch and Industrial IoT applications for decades to come all delivered through a world-class services capability.

"By integrating Niara into Aruba's ClearPass policy management capability, we will create a powerful network security offering to better protect our customers' data as IoT applications become increasingly central to the way they run their businesses."

HPE has been on quite the spending spree over the last few months. In August 2016, the company bought high-performance computing (HPC) player SGI for $275 million, before going on to buy hyperconverged infrastructure company SimpliVity in mid-January for $650 million - both of which were cash transactions. A planned acquisition of analytics firm CloudCruiser was announced in January as well.

Financial details of the Niara deal haven't been disclosed, although it's unlikely to have cost HPE quite as much as SGI or SimpliVity.