NetXactics, southern African distributor for Sophos Anti-Virus, a world leader in anti-virus protection for businesses, today announced that Sophos has acquired ActiveState, a North American software company that develops anti-spam software for enterprises and professional tools for open source language programmers.
Driven by mounting pressures to ensure a secure and low-cost infrastructure, organisations are increasingly demanding consolidated protection against security threats such as viruses, spam and policy breaches. The transaction, worth $23 million in cash, thrusts UK-based Sophos into the leading position in meeting the expanding secure content management needs of businesses worldwide.
ActiveState is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and serves more than two million customers, including HP, Intel and Microsoft. Sophos has purchased all the shares of ActiveState, and will retain all of ActiveState`s 100-plus employees. ActiveState`s headquarters in Vancouver will become an additional centre for research and development for Sophos and will also provide local market support in Canada as well as expanding Sophos`s west coast support.
Industry analyst Gartner claims that up to 50% of the average business mailbox is spam. (1) Although both the US and UK governments are proposing legislation against spammers, the problem is threatening to swamp businesses, preventing them from operating efficiently. Acquiring ActiveState leaves Sophos well positioned to meet enterprise demands for consolidated e-mail protection. As Arabella Hallawell, research director at Gartner, reports: "There is growing enterprise demand for combined anti-spam and anti-virus product and service capabilities at the e-mail boundary."
Industry analyst Ferris Research agrees. "Sophos and ActiveState have a shared vision, strong and complementary products, and a similar culture of engineering excellence," says David Ferris, president, Ferris Research. "Enterprises increasingly look to a single vendor for protection against spam and viruses at the gateway, so the acquisition of ActiveState by Sophos makes a lot of sense."
"The proliferation of spam, combined with Sophos`s existing customers` increasing desire to receive anti-virus and anti-spam protection from the same source, means that now is a very strategic time for Sophos to expand into spam filtering," said Brett Myroff, CEO of NetXactics. "With a focus on serving business environments, ActiveState has a very similar company culture to Sophos.
There is also a good technical fit between both companies` proprietary technologies. ActiveState`s proven technology, its impressive customer base, its expertise in the open source world, and in particular the quality of its staff are very valuable additions to Sophos."
"For the last three years, Sophos has significantly outperformed the anti-virus market as a whole. This impressive growth is a reflection of Sophos`s unwavering focus on the enterprise market and its commitment to customer service," said Steve Munford, President of ActiveState. "These qualities combined with our proven technology means that the company is well placed to meet the IT security needs of businesses. We are excited to be joining the Sophos team."
Sophos`s anti-virus technology will be integrated with PureMessage, ActiveState`s enterprise e-mail protection software, to deliver industry-leading anti-virus and anti-spam protection in a single, consolidated solution - Sophos PureMessage. PureMessage currently supports AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris.
(1) James Lundy, Maurene Caplan Grey, and Arabella Hallawell, "Stop Spam from Killing Workforce Productivity," 22 September 2003.
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