McAfee acquires Secure Computing for $465 million

23 September 2008

McAfee, a complete network security company announced an agreement to acquire its rival, Secure Computing for $5.75 per common share in cash, without interest, for a total value of $413 million, a deal that is expected to be completed by year end.

In addition, Secure Computing's outstanding shares of preferred stock will also be redeemed for cash as part of the proposed transaction, at approximately additional $84 million. Totally, net of cash held by Secure, the proposed transaction would be valued at approximately $465 million.

This is the second acquisition for McAfee in less than two months, having acquired privately held data loss prevention company Reconnex for $46 million in August, and its biggest till date.

The deal will strengthen McAfee leadership position in security risk management by combining Secure Computing's strengths in firewall, Web and e-mail gateway filtering with McAfee's intrusion prevention, desktop encryption, data-leak prevention, antimalware, regulatory compliance and centralised management.

"Today's announcement of this pending acquisition is a natural extension of McAfee's security-only focus," DeWalt explained. "We expect the pending combination of McAfee and Secure Computing will create an annual projected combined revenue of just under $500 million in the network security segment of our SRM portfolio. We believe that this pending acquisition will allow us to immediately establish a leading and highly competitive position in the network security space."

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. Also Secure Computing TrustedSource technology will extend McAfee's "in-the-cloud" security as a service offering