The deal, comprised of $1 million cash and stock currently worth $6.1 million, will allow Blue Coat to expand beyond its specialty of security proxies that deal with only web-like protocols such as HTTP, FTP and instant messaging.
The main product the company wants to get its hands on is the eShield appliances, which use Ositis software in combination with anti-virus technology from Network Associates, Sophos, Trend Micro and Panda to stop email and web viruses.
NeSmith said Blue Coat intends to sell the eShield appliances alongside its own ProxySG appliances. In future, the company may consider other integration possibilities, such as a blade/chassis architecture, or putting both technologies on a single device.
Ositis, the third-largest supplier of antivirus appliances, was bringing in about $1 million of revenue a quarter and had just reached profitability.
Blue Coat will take on over 20 employees, and will keep Ositis’s existing technology partners, one of whom was anti-spam player ActiveState, recently itself acquired by Sophos.
The email security market is growing, driven by increasing numbers of high-volume mass mailer viruses and the spam pandemic, but is extremely crowded, with literally dozens of companies springing up or expanding into the space in the last year.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
