On Monday, Chronicle — a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet — announced Backstory, a cybersecurity product designed to help companies figure out how to protect themselves from hackers.
And Splunk, a publicly-traded company that makes a similar product to Backstory, saw its shares dip as low as 7.7% following the announcement, and ultimately closed about 5% down from its opening price.
What the two companies have in common: They want to make it easier for companies to analyze the ever-growing amount of data generated by modern computing infrastructure to figure out when and how attacks happen, and provide the information how to fix them.
"We believe the power of the security community is our best defense against aggressive and determined attackers," Chronicle wrote in a blog post. "By offering a global platform with the ability to apply massive computational capacity to an ever-growing set of enterprise security data, our goal is for Chronicle to help enterprise customers, as well as other vendors, to better protect what matters most."
Chronicle originally began as a cybersecurity division in X, formerly Google X, Alphabet's so-called "moonshot factory." It was spun out of X in January 2018, but took the interim to develop and announce its new product.
In an interview with CNBC, Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett said that he didn't see Backstory as being competitive with other security products, but rather complimentary.
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For its part, just Thursday, Splunk announced that it generated $622 million in revenue last quarter, beating Wall Street's estimates of $561 million, NASDAQ reported. The company has been trying to focus on using cloud subscriptions to grow its business, and provide more security products to IT teams.
