Dell has announced plans to acquire unified threat management (UTM) and next-generation firewall vendor SonicWALL.
During a conference call today, Dell revealed it will be gaining SonicWALL’s UTM appliances and SuperMassive NGF technology, as well as its 300,000 customers. It will also seek to integrate the 15,000 channel partners the security provider works with.
Dell will take on SonicWall’s 950 employees. It will also gain a handy stack of over 130 patents, either pending or registered.
“We’ve been making good progress on building Dell IP,” said recently-appointed president at Dell Software, John Swainson – a former CEO of CA. “Businesses are feeling worse, not better, about their security.
“Customers have consistently voiced their concerns about their security products… the addition of SonicWALL gives Dell a very extensive range of security capability.
“I don’t see this as a hardware sale. This is a software sale with a hardware fabric.”
SonicWALL was founded in 1991 and was originally a networking supplier. It went public in 1999 and hired a new management team in 2003. Matt Medeiros, SonicWALL CEO, said he was looking forward to integrating his company’s technology with Dell’s other security offerings.
“Taking this step with Dell is a really natural progression,” he added. “It’s exciting that we will be integrating with Dell’s reach and its existing skills.”
Dell has been very acquisitive, and has made some big splashes in the security space in recent times. In January 2011, it bought SecureWorks. In February this year, it acquired backup and replication software maker AppAssure.
The company has refashioned itself over the past two years into a full data centre provider and the security moves have formed part of that.
There has been a slew of acquisitions in the security space this year. This month has seen Trustwave acquire M86 Security, whilst Juniper bought so-called “intrusion-deception” vendor Mykonos in February.
Thoma Bravo agrees to acquire Darktrace for $5.32 billion in cash, delivering some welcome news…
Customer adoption of AI services embedded in cloud services continues to deliver results for Microsoft,…
TikTok's 'secret source' algorithm is so core to ByteDance, it would rather shut down US…
After relocating from California to Texas in 2020, Oracle's Larry Ellison now reveals plan to…
Share price hit after Meta admits heavy AI spending plans, after posting strong first quarter…
For third time Google delays phase-out of third-party Chrome cookies after pushback from industry and…