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. Thanks for putting together the list.

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

    ReplyDelete

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