Cisco said the high premium cash and stock based takeover, which is said to be its fifth biggest deal to date, should be finalized by the third quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2007 and will be neutral to earnings in that period. IronPort has a headcount in excess of 400 with employees based primarily in San Bruno, California from where they market a range of messaging security products that compete with the likes of Symantec, CipherTrust and Mirapoint.
IronPort revenues are not disclosed but the company is on record as recording between $25m and $35m in sales during 2004, more than doubling to $50m to $80m during 2005.
IronPort’s filters have established an enviable market position for themselves among the 1,500 strong customer base, as carrying some pretty innovative technology. The company has pioneered the addition of reputation filtering, and its threat filtering software has also been shown to be very effective at stopping new email worms in the period between their release into the wild and when anti-virus companies release signatures to detect them.
IronPort is best known for its open source SenderBase reputation database which pulls spam statistics from 75,000 participating networks.
It has built a model of Reputation Filters around this which allow its appliances to look at the reputation of the incoming mail sever and throttle the traffic according to past behavior. The more spam-like a mail server appears, the slower the connection. Reputation Filters can stop more than 80% of incoming spam, before it even enters a network, IronPort claims. IronPort appliances also use spam filter algorithms to examine the full context of a message to reduce the chance of false positives.
Last November the company bought PostX Corp in a shares-only deal intended to enable it to add native email encryption to its line of email security appliances.
Richard Palmer, Cisco svp said that the company sees strong business potential in developing enhanced email and message protection solutions that are integrated into the existing Cisco Self-Defending Network framework. That initiative is a part of Cisco’s overall push to add more intelligence into the network with developments like support for quarantine on routers, and integrated antivirus for its intrusion detection system software.
The proposed acquisition of IronPort effectively extends the self-defending network to messaging and web security services.
The networking vendor maintains that point security products may appear cheaper than buying an integrated architecture, but over time they prove costly while support is hard to secure. The line Cisco is holding is that businesses need to begin to evaluate security from an architectural standpoint and look at initiatives such as the Cisco Self-Defending Network via Network Admission Control and the Cisco Compatible Extensions program.
Closely held IronPort, which has been trading for six years, is backed by venture capitalists including Menlo Partners. Scott Weiss, CEO of IronPort Systems, will now operate as chief of a business unit in Cisco’s Security Technology Group, reporting into Palmer.
