EMC may be looking to use its cash hoard to acquire security companies in a move to beef up that part of its business.
Bloomberg reported EMC is considering investing some of its $5.65 billion in cash to increase its security technology portfolio.
Best known as the leading storage vendor, EMC is already a major player in the security industry thanks to its May 2006 acquisition of RSA, a provider of security, risk and compliance management solutions.
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EMC later that year also acquired Network Intelligence, which built tools to capture data from the network, security, host, application and storage layers of an enterprise for compliance, security forensics and auditing purposes.
Security is also a growing business for EMC. In July, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company reported that, during its second fiscal quarter of 2012, EMC's RSA Security division saw revenue growth of 13 percent over last year to $221 million.
David Goulden, EMC's newly-appointed president, COO and CFO, said at the time that security is a top customer concern and that EMC has been working to integrate security with other EMC and VMware products.
EMC declined to comment on this story.
Bloomberg wrote that one potential acquisition target for EMC in the security market is Fortinet, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based developer of security appliances for firewall, VPN, antivirus, intrusion prevention, application control, Web filtering, antispam, wireless controller and WAN acceleration.
Another candidate is Palo Alto Networks, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of firewall appliances that include hardware with dedicated processing resources for security, networking, content scanning and management.
A third possibility, Bloomberg wrote, is Redwood City, Calif.-based Check Point Software Technologies, which develops security appliances with software security modules for a variety of threats.
EMC is no stranger to acquisitions. In addition to RSA, it has acquired virtualization kingpin VMware, enterprise content management developer Documentum and XtremIO, a startup developer of all-flash storage arrays.
Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO, in May told CRN that EMC spends an average of $2 billion a year on acquiring technology companies,
PUBLISHED AUG. 15, 2012
