SPIE’s move to bring Cyqueo under its wing feels like one of those moments where the industry quietly shifts a few degrees, even if most people won’t notice it until later. Reading through the announcement, you can sense how deliberately this acquisition slots into SPIE’s bigger arc: reinforcing its position in energy and communications while climbing deeper into the escalating world of cybersecurity. Cyqueo, tucked away in Munich but operating with a surprisingly wide reach, comes in with a kind of confidence that only two decades of doing one thing exceptionally well can give you. Their reputation in Zero Trust, cloud security, endpoint protection, and managed security services has been growing in the background for years, and it’s almost amusing how modestly the announcement mentions that 1.6 million users are already relying on their solutions. That’s not a niche footprint; that’s enterprise-level trust built layer by layer.
What struck me most is the certification density they’ve achieved. Averaging sixteen relevant certifications per employee sounds almost unreal, like a team that treats professional qualification as muscle memory. No wonder they’re among the biggest partners of Zscaler and Proofpoint in Germany. A fifteen-year partnership in cybersecurity is practically a lifetime, and SPIE is clearly buying not just services, but long-standing relationships, credibility, and technical fluency that can’t be faked or accelerated. The founders, Philipp and Patric Liebold, talk about the decision with the kind of calm certainty you hear from people who know exactly what they’ve built and are ready to see it reach its next phase. You can almost imagine them standing in the Munich office, looking back at twenty years of steady growth, and deciding that SPIE’s broader infrastructure makes the most sense for scaling what comes next.
From SPIE’s perspective, the appeal seems obvious. The German, Swiss, and Austrian markets sit right in that pressure zone where digital transformation, cloud adoption, OT-IT convergence, and geopolitically driven security demands are all accelerating at once. Bringing Cyqueo into the Information & Communication Services division feels less like adding a new unit and more like wiring in a missing capability. Rainer Hollang and Marcus Hänsel talk about cloud-native expertise and passion as if they’ve been looking for precisely this kind of team for a while. And honestly, you can see why. Cybersecurity has become the connective tissue of modern infrastructure—energy grids, communications networks, industrial systems, everything is suddenly porous and interconnected. The move gives SPIE a deeper bench when facing security-critical projects where the stakes are no longer theoretical.
Cyqueo’s scale is small—28 people, EUR 20 million in 2024 revenue—but the precision of their expertise makes the acquisition feel punchier than the numbers suggest. The team is the product, and SPIE’s platform now gives them amplification. Whether this becomes a quiet internal upgrade or a noticeable shift in SPIE’s market positioning depends on how aggressively they integrate the capabilities, but it’s hard not to sense momentum. The cybersecurity market isn’t forgiving, and bringing in a specialist team with two decades of operational history could be one of those deceptively smart moves that strengthens SPIE far beyond its headline size.
All in all, it reads like a chapter-opening moment for both sides: Cyqueo trading independence for reach, and SPIE adding a sharp new instrument to an increasingly complex toolkit.
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