McAfee Buys Secure Computing For $465 Million

McAfee, in a bid to decisively round out its network security product portfolio, on Monday announced plans to purchase San Jose, Calif.-based Secure Computing for about $465 million.

Vimal Solanki, vice president of worldwide solutions marketing at McAfee, says the Secure deal will help McAfee to offer a "complete network security offering," a term that McAfee uses to describe the potpourri of intrusion prevention, firewall, Web security, email security, data protection, and network access control technologies.

Secure's focus on Web and network security complements McAfee's strong endpoint security technologies, and the fact that both companies do more than 90 percent of their business through channel partners is another area of common ground between the two vendors, according to Solanki.

The deal, if approved, will create a powerhouse with combined network security revenue of $500 million, and would add 2,000 solution providers to McAfee's existing global channel partner base of 12,000, Solanki added.

Secure's TrustedSource in-the-cloud security intelligence technology meshes well with McAfee's Artemis technology, a cloud offering that provides realtime protection from threats, Solanki said.

Steven Palange, president of security solution provider TLIC Worldwide, Wakefield, R.I., sees the deal as a welcome boost to McAfee's portfolio, one that will be most apparent in areas like Web filtering, firewall, and the Secure Mail (formerly Ironmail) line of email security appliances.

"They're going to use Secure to plug some of their holes, and that's likely to work out well, since Secure fits well into McAfee's existing line of products with very little overlap," Palange said.

However, one security solution provider wasn't surprised by the news, and considers Secure to be a vendor of steadily diminishing importance in the security market.

"Secure was pretty much dead in the water and wasn't going anywhere -- we almost never come across Secure's products," said the source, who requested anonymity.