Sophos has announced the acquisition of India-based Cyberoam Technologies, a leading global provider of network security products. The acquisition expands and deepens Sophos’ already significant product portfolio in network security, by combining Cyberroam’s UTM, next-gen firewall and network security expertise with Sophos’ existing network security solutions in UTM and wireless security.
CEO of Sophos, Kris Hagerman, discusses what this acquisition means for the future of Sophos.
This acquisition places Sophos in an even stronger position to succeed in the dynamic and fast growing network security market. With Cyberoam, we add more resources to accelerate our network security vision across every aspect of our business: more resources for product innovation, more sales and partner reach, more support strength, and a higher profile as a disruptive leader in the industry.
Our goal in coming together is very simple: to take the significant success that each company is achieving on its own, and to expand and accelerate that success even further. With Cyberoam, we add more resources to accelerate our success in network security, across every aspect of the business: more resources for product innovation, more sales and partner reach, more support strength, and a higher profile as a disruptive leader in the industry.
Both Sophos and Cyberoam have a shared focus on the large and high growth network security market. Both companies are innovators who have substantially outpaced the market growth in UTM, one of the fastest growing IT security markets. Both companies are dedicated to making security simple and are focused on the same customer segment of small and midmarket enterprises and “pragmatic enterprises” of any size.
Cyberoam delivers a set of high performance complementary product and technology assets that will broaden the Sophos solutions portfolio and expand opportunities for partners and customers. The fact that both companies share a common core architecture was a major driver behind the acquisition of Cyberoam. Rapid integration of the separate solution strengths will be enabled by both sets of network security solutions being based on similar foundations, common attributes include:
– Hardened Linux operating systems (OS)
– Optimized Intel compatible server systems
– Modular security applications
– Use of Open Source technologies (e.g., Snort IPS)
In addition to a shared common architecture in UTM and network security, the companies have a broad range of complementary technologies. Cyberoam customers and partners will benefit from Sophos strengths in threat protection, endpoint protection, secure Wi-Fi and innovations like Sophos RED (Remote Ethernet Device) to help protect large distributed networks. Cyberoam brings unique capabilities in user based policy with its Layer 8 Identity-based polices, application control, high performance packet filtering, and logging and reporting.
The transaction results in two highly-successful companies joining forces, and ideally positions the combined company to succeed in the dynamic and fast growing network security market. According to IDC, the UTM market is $2.5B and growing at 20% per year. Both Sophos and Cyberoam are performing very well in the market, and outgrowing our competitors. But together we have the opportunity to accelerate that success and become a more significant player in network security – not only in UTM, but in a number of exciting adjacent markets that are growing even faster, like next generation firewall (NGFW), advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, and wireless security. The combined company provides more resources to accelerate our shared network security vision across every aspect of our business: more resources for product innovation, more sales and partner reach, more support strength, and a higher profile as a disruptive leader in the industry.
Sophos will continue to pursue growth both through organic means as well as through acquisitions to achieve our mission of delivering complete IT security to small and midmarket enterprises (and “pragmatic enterprises” of any size) and the channel that serves them.
Sophos is a developer and vendor of security software and hardware, providing endpoint, encryption, email, web, mobile and network security as well as Unified Threat Management products. Sophos is largely focused on providing security to organisations and businesses.
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