With the upcoming Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) split-up, the H-P Enterprise unit (comprised of infrastructure hardware, software and services) will be more agile and focused when it comes to building out its datacenter, cloud and security businesses.

There’s no doubt that this enterprise unit will be looking to boost its tepid growth rate through inorganic means. The M&A team at H-P Enterprise must be hard at work reviewing various buyout targets. Here are some suggestions for their shopping list:

In order to stay competitive, H-P Enterprise should expand its presence in the fast-growing security segment. A top buyout idea: Palo Alto Networks (PANW) is one of the leading players in cybersecurity and has become a true platform vendor, offering a complete portfolio, including the new Traps endpoint protection solution. The company has more than 19,000 customers, including 850 of the Global 2000 and 75 of the Fortune 100.

The company’s WildFire subscription service for advanced persistent threats (APTs) has more than 3,000 paid customers (an additional 1,000 are on free trials), with the attach rate up to 40%. WildFire quickly identifies (within 15 minutes, up from 28 minutes earlier this year) and stops unknown malware, zero-day exploits and other targeted attacks without the need for human intervention or pricey incident response services after the fact.

The company is seeing more replacement wins (against top-tier competitors such as Cisco Systems, Check Point Software and Juniper Networks) and experiencing early success with its PA-7050 enterprise firewall for protecting datacenters and high-speed networks.

With a market cap of $7.8 billion, Palo Alto isn’t cheap, trading at 9.5 times the fiscal 2015 (July) consensus revenue estimate of $821.3 million (expected growth of 37.3%); the FY’15 Street-high estimate is $871.4 million.

Proofpoint (PFPT) is an emerging vendor in cloud-based security—offering on-demand data protection, archiving and privacy solutions. Proofpoint serves more than 2,700 customers (mainly midsize and larger companies) across a wide variety of verticals. Founded in 2002, the company went public in April 2012.

Proofpoint over the past five years has diversified its revenue base away from its core focus on email security. The company, which still generates about half of its revenue from this protection business (fighting off spam, viruses and malware), is among the leading vendors for secure email gateways.

About 30% of Proofpoint’s revenue now comes from its archiving solutions, which help customers reduce eDiscovery costs, drive compliance efficiency, track high value content and defensibly dispose of unneeded information. Archiving (of emails, documents and files) is ripe for the shift to the cloud, as search and discovery is 10 times faster and as much as 60% cheaper compared to legacy offerings.

Archiving is quite attractive to Proofpoint because the company can charge as much as three times the per-user subscription fee compared to the core protection solution. In addition, Proofpoint benefits from a Microsoft (MSFT) partnership whereby the software giant resells the company’s archiving solution (under the Proofpoint brand) to its largest Office 365 accounts. The Microsoft relationship has been a lucrative one for Proofpoint, contributing about 15% of total revenue.

Proofpoint’s privacy offering, representing about 20% of total revenue, is a data security and data loss prevention solution providing policy-based email encryption across desktops, laptops and mobile devices. The solution is increasingly in demand (particularly in the financial services and healthcare verticals) because tougher regulations mandate stricter privacy policies and larger fines are being imposed for data breaches.

For this year and next, Proofpoint’s revenue growth is expected to average more than 29%. The recent market cap of $1.4 billion is six times the 2015 consensus revenue estimate of $230 million.

Imperva (IMPV), a provider of datacenter security solutions, would be a more inexpensive target for H-P Enterprise. At a recent market cap of $801 million, the company trades at 4.2 times the 2015 consensus revenue estimate of $193 million (expected growth of 21.5%). Imperva has more than 3,300 customers in 75 countries.

The security landscape is evolving, with multiple new threats aimed at databases and applications across both on-premise and cloud environments. Given all of the new advanced attacks, Imperva makes a compelling case for datacenter security becoming an important third pillar in the IT security market, joining the traditional endpoint and network segments.

But even with ramped-up attacks on the datacenter, IT security spending is still focused on the same things it was 10 to 12 years ago, primarily anti-virus (endpoints) and firewalls (network), which don’t protect databases or applications.

While research firm IDC estimates that just 4% of IT security spending this year will be in the datacenter, Imperva says more organizations are realizing that their most crucial databases and applications need to be locked down, whether on-premise or in the cloud.

The massive shift to the cloud is creating lots of added security concerns, and new opportunities for Imperva. Cloud services, which often run critical applications and store business-critical data, require security controls not covered by solutions designed for on-premise deployments. These days, the cloud equals datacenters; organizations need to protect their data and applications no matter where they reside.

The company’s Incapsula subscription service provides Web application security in the cloud (it’s also a content delivery network, and includes load balancing and acceleration features), while Imperva’s new SecureSphere Web application firewall for Amazon Web Services (AWS) protects externally facing production applications on the increasingly popular AWS infrastructure. The company’s newly acquired Skyfence cloud gateway secures applications offered by cloud-software providers.

On the infrastructure side, an intense battle is taking place in the high-speed datacenter switch market, the only piece of the overall Ethernet switch market that’s showing any meaningful growth. Arista Networks (ANET), a pure-play switch vendor with a focus on software, is shaking things up and steadily gaining market share. The company was founded in 2004 and shipped its first product in 2008.

The overall switch market last year was worth about $22 billon, with datacenter switches representing $6 billion (27% of the total) and older technology Ethernet switches at $16.1 billion, according to Crehan Research and Dell’Oro Group. By 2017, it’s estimated that the datacenter switch piece will increase to $12 billion (49% of the total), while the standard Ethernet segment will decline to $12.5 billion. 

The cloud megatrend is at work here. There is a massive shift of capital expenditures to support infrastructure investments in the cloud. As more data and applications move to the cloud, more datacenters are required worldwide, leading to increased demand for high-speed Ethernet switches (10, 40 and 100 GbE), which are highly available and can handle massive data flows.

The always-on connectivity requirement of the cloud environment gives the high-speed switch market a high barrier to entry. Switch veteran Cisco Systems (CSCO) controls about 70% of the market. Hewlett-Packard is considered an also-ran here, but it could change that with an acquisition of Arista, which is the only major player showing significant growth.

For 2014, Arista’s revenue is expected to advance 56% to $563.5 million, with the company controlling about 7% of the datacenter switch market. At a recent market cap of $4.8 billion, Arista trades at 6.4 times the 2015 consensus revenue estimate of $746 million. By 2016, Arista’s revenue could approach $1 billion.

Arista’s software focus is the one thing that really sets it apart from other switch vendors. Fully 90% of Arista’s engineering resources are always at work on improving the company’s software stack. Based on pure Linux, Arista’s EOS operating system is fully open and programmable, two things required by Web 2.0 and cloud services customers. Competitors claim to have open systems, but they’re not as flexible. Arista’s offering is also highly reliable, boasting the only operating system that is “self-healing,” meaning lightning quick recovery times.

In addition to Web and cloud customers, Arista targets high-tech enterprises and the financial services vertical. The company has an installed base of 2,700 customers; Arista has a long-standing strategic relationship with Microsoft, the only 10%+ customer. For 2014, Arista’s business with Microsoft is expected to be flat year over year, putting the software giant at about 15% of total revenue. As Arista’s customer base broadens, the Microsoft-related revenue concentration will come down.

In cloud software, ServiceNow (NOW), a provider of solutions to automate enterprise IT operations, would be a solid acquisition target because the company is quickly expanding its total addressable market (TAM) by serving a broader array of use cases. ServiceNow has the potential to bring the IT service model to overall enterprise service management, opening up a plethora of adjacent growth opportunities beyond its core business of handling workflows around traditional help-desk management.

At a recent market cap of $8.3 billion, ServiceNow trades at 8.9 times the 2015 consensus revenue estimate of $933 million. Revenue growth for the two-year period ended next year is expected to average 48.5%.

The company’s solutions enable customers to operate more efficiently and profitably. Basically, the company’s offerings monitor and analyze an organization’s IT infrastructure, automating and orchestrating processes and applications. Intelligent infrastructure learns from past behaviors to pick up on patterns, predict capacity needs and proactively make changes. Disruption of the huge installed base of technologically weak legacy solutions is the broad goal for ServiceNow.

One important new solution for the company in terms of expanding the TAM is HR Service Automation, which moves human resources case management to a service model, replacing the traditional method of employees barraging the HR department with questions via email and voicemail. Introduced last year, HR Service Automation has seen good uptake because the solution streamlines and improves HR service delivery, offering employees a self-serve catalog.

Employees place help requests from among the catalog’s predefined set of services (covering everything from benefits to employee relations), with cases automatically assigned to designated HR specialists for fulfillment. With integrated reporting, the customer can gain insights into volume, types of requests and individual workloads, giving the HR manager the ability to align services and resources, as well as improve overall operations within the unit.

A big positive: HR often provides ServiceNow with a beachhead into an organization that’s not quite ready for a full IT operations management switch to the cloud. The company’s pipeline of HR-related deals continues to build, so this should provide additional growth firepower going into next year.

Another new offering, Facilities Service Automation, automates the request and delivery of facilities information and services. While facilities managers today use a variety of inefficient tools to handle the maintenance and operation of factory floors, warehouses, distribution centers and office campuses, ServiceNow’s solution automates the whole process, directing requests to the right individual or team for quick analysis and resolution. The Facilities Service Automation solution makes things even easier for management because it includes a feature that displays incidents and requests via floor plan visualizations.