SECURITY M&A GONE A BIT CRAZY ....

The tech sector and in particular the security sector within  has been extremely active during the past 6 months.  There have been numerous acquisitions that indicate an increased appetite for quality security assets.   
  • Perhaps the most high profile of these was the recent acquisition of MacAfee by Intel ( a $7.8bn transaction ) representing a premium of over 50% to the then prevailing market price.  A PE multiple of about 48 and 3.8 x Revenue. This was Intel’s largest ever acquisition.
  • Symantec acquired Verisign’s Authentication business for $1.28bn - approximately 4 x revenues. (Second quarter revenues from this Unit was about $100m )  ( May ) ;
  • CA has announced it will acquire Arcot systems for $200m in Q4 2010.  Arcot provides Identity Access Management and Authentication products  (www.ca.com/www.arcot.com) ; 
  • VMWare has announced it will acquire Integrien and TriCipher.  (Sep) 
  • HP has just announced it will acquire ArcSight for $1.5bn ( Sep) 
Other deals over the period : 
  • Gemalto Acquires Israeli Start-up Trivnet for $40 mln ( Sep );
  • Google bought Slide for $182m ( July ); 
  • St Bernard  Software acquired Red Condor ( July ) 
  • MacAfee acquired Trust Digital ( June );  
  • IBM acquired Storwize ( June ); 
  • Webroot acquired White Cloud ( June ); 
  • GFI Software acquired Sunbelt Software ( June ) ; 
  • IBM acquired Big Fix ( Speculation $400m - June ) ;  
  • TrustWave acquired Breach Security ( June ) ;  
  • MacAfee acquired tenCube technologies ( July ) ; 
  • Symantec acquired Guardian Edge for $70m ( April);  
  • Symantec acquired PGP corp for $300m ( April) ;  
  • Cisco acquired Rohati Systems ( Feb ) ; 
  • HP bought 3Par for $2.4bn after a bidding war with Dell (Sep).    The price paid was  nearly 12 x revenue. ( It has revenues of $200m but no profit !) 
  • Dell acquired Ocarina networks ( June );  
  • Apax bought a majority stake in Sophos ( Valuing the business at $830m) ( May) 
What does this all mean ? 
Clearly there is a lot of cash around;  
there is a shortage of good quality assets to be had (hence the bidding wars) ;  
the big guys are not innovating ( a repeated pattern? )
an opportunity for disruptive players to get out there - make their mark and dress up!!
Last but not least - the growth in the Internet and social networking in particular demands new elegant security solutions !!
Thanks for reading.  Happy hunting.  

Comments

  1. Unknown21 September 2010 at 14:35

    Thanks for putting together the list.

    Love to see http://www.proactiverisk.com get aquired too ;)

    ReplyDelete

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