McAfee - Latest Updates

When thinking about the antivirus market, my head usually starts spinning pretty fast, simply because I think this is one of the most profitable areas for those working on Windows software. Viruses, spyware, phishing, spam, and so many more dangers lurking in the dark corners of the Web, they are all waiting to take over your computer, so it's no surprise there are so many companies involved in this, and most of them are doing a pretty good job. McAfee is one of them, and since the big fish always eats the little one in this industry, they decided to buy Secure Computing before anyone else would have thought about it...

OK, so we all know about McAfee and its products, but what about Secure Computing? If you don't want to bother visiting their website, here's how they describe themselves - "Secure Computing provides Internet security appliances and software solutions that proactively protect businesses against email and Web threats like viruses, spam, malware and network intrusion, as well as regulations / compliance risks." Their products include Webwasher, a tool for filtering corporate Web traffic, the Ironmail encrypted mail servers, as well as Sidewinder firewall appliances and SnapGear VPN devices.

According to the official press release, the expectations McAfee has from this deal worth about $465 million are the following:

- With Secure Computing, McAfee expects to become one of the largest network security players, delivering the industry’s most complete network security solution to businesses of all sizes, extending the success of its total protection

strategy through best of breed technology suites
- Secure Computing TrustedSource technology will extend McAfee’s “in-the-cloud” security as a service offering
- With Secure Computing, McAfee expects to be able to deliver the complete content and data lifecycle management at the network, spanning detection, filtering, encryption, blocking, archiving, reporting and compliance
- Secure Computing has more than 22,000 customers in 106 countries that will be able to rely upon McAfee as a single source for complete security portfolio—spanning endpoint, network, data and risk and compliance

Since I mentioned the antivirus/data security market as a whole in the beginning, here's some data for your reference - last year, McAfee's revenue totalled $1.3 billion, with network security sales of about $500 million per year. Not bad at all, not bad at all!

These are only the latest updates, but it's also worth mentioning that, last year, McAfee acquired Israeli data protection company Onigma for $20 million, as well as the encryption and access control vendor SafeBoot, for $350 million.