http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=9183
By John E. Dunn
Techworld
18 June 2007
PatchLink has announced plans to acquire application security company
SecureWave for an undisclosed sum.
The deal is being structured as a merger, with SecureWave shareholders
getting shares in the new company in return for their current holding.
However, this is more than a passive acquisition - one of SecureWave’s
founding shareholders, Mangrove Capital Partners, is to be given a seat
on the merged board. Both companies are privately-held which makes price
disclosure unlikely.
This means two small but notable endpoint-related companies have been
bought out in a week. On June 13, it was announced that SonicWall was
acquiring SSL vendor Aventail for $25 million.
In this latest acquisition, buying Securewave represents a new departure
for PatchLink, which does not currently have application security
products to sell with its patching and vulnerability management
software.
Securewave’s SecureEXE, in particular, is a good example of a
‘whitelisting’ application, an area some see as the future of software
security. The software identifies authorised applications and allows
only these to run, thereby excluding malware without the need for
signature-based detection.
"This emphasis on fixing problems before they occur will create a
significant market for integrated security policy and remediation
management. A proactive stance will also reduce security risk across the
enterprise. PatchLink’s acquisition of SecureWave provides solutions to
reduce risk,” the official released quoted IDC analyst Charles Kolodgy
as saying.
Neither company qualifies as startup fodder, despite their private
ownership. PatchLink has been around since 1991, and even SecureWave –
the most notable tech company to come out of Luxembourg – was founded as
long ago as 1996. The newly combined company will have 230 employees,
large for a private outfit.
Received on Tue Jun 19 00:06:20 2007