Contact: Scott Denne Adrian Sanabria
With the acquisition of Carbon Black, Bit9 continues to reinvent itself, moving beyond its roots in whitelisting and toward a holistic threat detection and prevention vendor. Founded in 2002 and venture-funded since 2004, Bit9 gained traction in financial sectors and niche products such as point-of-sale terminals and grew its revenue to about $45m last year, with the lion’s share of its growth coming in the past three or four years.
We understand the deal values Carbon Black at more than $40m – a nice number for a company with an impressive list of early customers and little revenue (it began selling products in earnest in May 2013). Carbon Black brings Bit9 endpoint sensors that go beyond detecting file events to monitor registry changes, network connections and binary executions, enabling Bit9 to move beyond prevention and into threat response.
In addition to shedding its whitelisting label, the acquisition will better position Bit9 to fend off an eventual FireEye endpoint offering that will likely result from its acquisition of Mandiant (Bit9 and FireEye are currently partners). It also improves its edge on endpoint competitors such as Invincea and Bromium that protect and remediate, but are limited in scope to the Web browser and some office applications.
Look for a more detailed report on this deal in tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.
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