UK antivirus company Sophos has bought Canadian company
ActiveState for £13.9m in cash, adding ActiveState's line of
antispam products to Sophos' enterprise antivirus
software.
The deal will strengthen the position of both companies, which
have faced stiff competition for business customers from major
antivirus firms selling integrated antispam and antivirus
products.
Vancouver-based ActiveState made a name for itself selling
software development tools for open-source languages before moving
into the content filtering arena.
The deal comes after the two companies formed a working
relationship six months ago to co-operate in selling their
technologies into large corporate accounts.
ActiveState products complement Sophos' software and the
companies had similar customer bases, focusing almost exclusively
on enterprises and business customers.
ActiveState's PureMessage antispam gateway analyses e-mail
messages to detect spam and also has content inspection features
which allow companies to set and enforce corporate policies for
message content.
Sophos initially will support PureMessage along with its own
gateway mail product, MailMonitor. The two products will be merged
some time next year.
Sophos also will continue to support ActiveState's development
tools business indefinitely under the ActiveState brand.
Though not core to Sophos' business model, ActiveState's
programming tools and languages business provides a deep well of
development experience within the company that can contribute to
filtering and antivirus tools.
The ActiveState products also have a loyal customer base within
Fortune 1000 companies.
Development of the PureMessage product will continue in
Vancouver and ActiveState's 104-person staff will be absorbed into
Sophos.
For Sophos, the decision to expand into antispam was inevitable,
according to Brian Burke of IDC. "Sophos had to get involved in
antispam. Their competition would have killed them if they
didn't."
Despite a strong reputation among enterprise customers,
especially in Europe, pressure on the UK company was mounting from
the likes of Symantec and Network Associates, which have all
announced new products or partnering agreements to add antispam to
their products in recent months, according to Forrester Research
industry analyst Jan Sundgren.
The ActiveState purchase also adds more generic content
filtering technology to Sophos' product line, which will serve the
company well with customers looking for help in areas such as
e-mail content security and compliance with regulations once the
spam wave has passed, Burke added.
Paul Roberts writes for IDG News Service