Contact: Brenon Daly
When Sophos reached for Astaro exactly a year ago, the two companies lined up very well on paper: Both Europe-based security vendors go to market entirely through the channel, selling primarily to SMBs. Yet they both addressed different aspects of security, with Sophos shoring up endpoints and Astaro focusing on the network.
While the two approaches appear complementary, the infosec landscape is fraught with endpoint/network pairings that haven’t gone to plan. (That goes for M&A both on a large scale, such as IBM-Internet Security Systems, and a small scale, such as Sourcefire-ClamAV.) So what’s the verdict on Sophos’ purchase of the German unified threat management (UTM) vendor? So far, so good.
As a company, Astaro has been fully integrated into Sophos over the past year while also maintaining its historic growth rate of about 30%. (We understand that the UTM business is currently running at about $70m.) Astaro’s growth would basically match the rate of UTM kingpin Fortinet, although that company will do more than a half-billion dollars of sales in 2012.
Sophos is currently in beta with a product that combines Astaro’s UTM technology and Sophos’ core endpoint security offering. The integrated product is due this summer. That offering will hit the market just as Dell works through the integration of its purchase of UTM provider SonicWALL. That deal, which represents Dell’s largest security acquisition, closed Wednesday.
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