Combined company poised for global leadership in enterprise
anti-virus and anti-spam protection
Singapore - Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus protection for
businesses, today announced that it 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.
ActiveState's product lines for open source programmers will
continue to be developed and sold under the ActiveState brand. As a
division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to
continuing its support of the open source language community.
Industry analysts Gartner Inc. claim that up to 50% of the
average business mailbox is spam. 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 email protection. As
Arabella Hallawell, research director, Gartner Inc., reports,
"There is growing enterprise demand for combined anti-spam and
anti-virus product and service capabilities at the email
boundary."
Industry analysts Ferris Research agree. "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 our 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 us to expand into spam filtering," said Peter Lammer,
founder and joint CEO of Sophos. "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."
ActiveState's President, Steve Munford, will be taking a key
role in driving the anti-spam element of Sophos's business,
becoming a member of the executive management team. Munford takes
the post of Global VP Messaging, and will attend Sophos Plc board
meetings.
"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 Munford. "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 email 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,"
September 22, 2003.
About ActiveState Corp
ActiveState, a division of Sophos, enables enterprises and IT
professionals to increase productivity and organisational
efficiency through the innovative use of open source technologies.
Over two million developers rely on ActiveState's open source
language programming tools, language distributions, and enterprise
support services. www.activestate.com.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.