Cenzic finds second act at Trustwave

Contact: Wendy Nather Scott Denne

Trustwave continues to add compliance offerings to its managed security service with the acquisition of Cenzic. The deal brings application security testing to Trustwave, which added database monitoring to its portfolio in a transaction late last year.

Cenzic fits the profile of a typical Trustwave purchase. It’s a company whose sales have plateaued with a niche product that will play better as part of a larger suite of services. We estimate that Cenzic clocked several years of $5-10m in annual revenue and $10m in trailing revenue, while competitors including Veracode and WhiteHat Security have grown faster. Cenzic is as well-known for its security testing as its patent litigation – it reached cross-licensing agreements with HP (WebInspect) and IBM (Watchfire), and forged settlements with NT OBJECTives and WhiteHat.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but most of Trustwave’s transactions have been valued at 1-2x trailing revenue. We’d expect this one was too, given that Cenzic was a motivated seller that had been in the market for some time.

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