The cybersecurity market is not consolidating. It is rewiring itself

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/cybersecurity-market-not-consolidating-rewiring-220111211.html

Publish Date: 2026-02-27 17:01:00

The cybersecurity industry defies long‑standing predictions of consolidation. PHOTO GETTY IMAGES

For more than two decades, the cybersecurity industry has been accompanied by a familiar refrain. There are too many vendors; too many tools; too much fragmentation. Eventually, the thinking goes, consolidation will clean it all up. Platforms will absorb point solutions, competition will thin out and order will return.

Richard Stiennon has been hearing that story for 25 years. He still does not believe it. As the founder of IT Harvest and one of the longest tenured analysts in cybersecurity, Stiennon tracks roughly four thousand security vendors and their products globally. From that vantage point, the idea that the industry is consolidating in any traditional sense is not just wrong. It misses what is happening beneath the surface.

Stiennon did not arrive in cybersecurity through a conventional analyst pipeline. He began his career in automotive engineering, moved into the early internet era by launching an ISP, and watched that company get acquired during the first wave of digital infrastructure buildout. That experience led him into security focused companies and eventually to Gartner, where he became one of the earliest analysts dedicated to covering cybersecurity as a standalone domain.

That chapter shaped his thinking. Traditional analyst models, he observed, tend to focus on the top tier of vendors in any category. Useful, but incomplete. The real market dynamics live in the long tail, where innovation forms long before it becomes obvious.

IT Harvest began as a spreadsheet tracking a few hundred vendors. Over time, it grew into a dataset of thousands. In 2022, Stiennon launched a dashboard to make that data searchable and usable at scale. The arrival of large language models only accelerated its value, making it possible to map not just vendors but products, categories and relationships across…

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