The poor economy, coupled with a tense geopolitical climate, has been good to most companies in the security market. CyberGuard, which makes about a quarter of its revenue from government, said it was no exception.
The company reported net income for the three months to March 31 of $5.1m, up from $81,000 a year ago, on revenue up 37% at $8.6m. CyberGuard said, however, that without the benefit of a tax refund, profit was only $979,000.
CyberGuard CEO Scott Hammack said in a statement: We have been investing significant resources back into our business because we see great opportunity to capture market share. And we continue to look for value M&A opportunities.
In a conference call, Hammock did not say what companies CyberGuard will look at, but mentioned SSL and IDS. The jury’s still out on intrusion detection and how that plays in, he said. It’s definitely interesting, but right now not a have-to-have.
Steering clear of IDS and intrusion prevention may be unavoidable anyway. Network Associates Inc just paid a total of over $200m for two such companies, and CyberGuard’s balance sheet shows just $19.3m in current assets at the end of the quarter, half of it cash.
The company bought NetOctave Inc, a provider of SSL acceleration cards that CyberGuard had partnered with for eight months for $1.5m in January and released products based on its technology in March.
CyberGuard has two more new products developed in-house coming in the next 30 days, Hammack said. The most significant, Global Command Center, will be a management application for overseers of hundreds of firewall appliances.
Historically… maybe the complexity of our product was more than the competition, and maybe that was a ding against us, Hammack said. New products coming out, particularly Global Command Center, will target the ease of use category.
Hammack also said CyberGuard will release a new model appliance, the 3200, which will feature throughput of 3Gbps, up a gigabit on previous releases.
Source: Computerwire
