The deal is valued at $4 cash per share, and was announced the same day as BindView said it will miss its revenue targets for its just-closed financial quarter.
Symantec said it wants BindView’s bv-Control software, which enables administrators to centrally configure and manage their computers according to corporate policy. Template policies for regulatory compliance are the key selling point.
Symantec’s Enterprise Security Manager software also plays in this space, but it requires agents to be deployed to each managed desktop, whereas BindView’s is agentless. Symantec sells to large global enterprises, but BindView’s market is lower-end.
With Sarbanes[-Oxley] and HIPAA, we’re now seeing more interest in compliance from the higher mid-market, Symantec’s vice president of security management Rowan Trollope said. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in this space.
Whatever growth the market is seeing hasn’t translated into very impressive growth in BindView’s revenues, however. The company has struggled over the last 12 months and has made a revenue warning.
BindView said it believes its third quarter saw revenue of between $17.7m and $18.1m, a little less than the $19m to $21m it had anticipated going into the quarter and further evidence that the company was struggling to grow solo.
In the same quarter 2004, revenue was $17.2m, making Q3 2005 the latest in a series of unimpressive quarters for the company. In Q205, revenue was $17.2m versus $17.9m. In Q105, it was $14.9m versus $14.8m a year earlier.
Symantec will not discuss many details of its product integration plans until the deal closes. If it passes regulatory perusal and shareholders approve it, that should happen in the first quarter of next year, the companies think.
But Mr Trollope did say that the two products, agent-based and agentless, would continue to be sold side-by-side, and that there would be a unified product over time.
