Both companies have a history of growth, or at least expansion, through acquisition. M86 grew from the combination of 8e6, Marshall, Finjan and Avinti. Trustwave’s acquisitions have included Vericept, Mirage Networks, Breach Security, BitArmor, ControlPath, and Intellitactics. On the surface, both companies will benefit from little overlap between them, but will suffer from the perennial difficulty of integrating different capabilities and cultures.
This doesn’t worry John Vigouroux, Chief Executive Officer at M86. “Trustwave has a tremendously successful track record of not only finding, acquiring and integrating security companies but also continuing to innovate their products and technologies,” he said at the announcement. “Customers and partners have a lot to look forward to as the combination of Trustwave and M86 Security gives them access to a broader, unified security portfolio powered by the industry’s most advanced threat technology intelligence.”
There is certainly great potential in this merger. M86 has three primary product ranges: a web gateway, an email gateway, and a web filtering and reporting suite. These will be integrated into Trustwave’s existing portfolio. The M86 Security Labs’ research capabilities will be merged with Trustwave’s own SpiderLabs. SpiderLabs looks inward at corporate data, analyzing the vulnerabilities that could be used by attackers. M86 Labs researches threats on the wider internet before they can be targeted at the vulnerabilities. In theory, combining the two will provide a more overall, rounded security stance.
“By acquiring M86 Security, Trustwave is adding web security to one of the industry’s most comprehensive security product portfolios – including our compliance, application, network and data security solutions,” Robert J. McCullen, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Trustwave. However, the new business will need to do better than Trustwave’s 2010 performance. Despite continued growth over the last few years, Trustwave made a net loss of $4.6m in 2010.
Special note: at the time of writing this report, the M86 website is unavailable. Infosecurity has been told that has been caused by a server migration issue and has nothing to do with the acquisition.