WatchGuard Buys BorderWare for E-Mail, Web Security

WatchGuard Technologies has bought fellow security vendor BorderWare Technologies to build its e-mail and Web security business.

The move, made for an undisclosed sum, will be officially announced Aug. 4. According to officials at WatchGuard, the acquisition expands the company's footprint beyond its traditional network security and UTM (unified threat management) appliances. 

"BorderWare certainly brings to WatchGuard a significant offering in terms of providing more e-mail security, protection in the form of—certainly anti-spam, e-mail encryption, data loss prevention—but also content protection as well," said Eric Aarrestad, vice president of marketing for WatchGuard. "From a market perspective, this greatly expands the addressable market for WatchGuard beyond the traditional UTM/XTM." 

WatchGuard's bread and butter has been the small and midsize business market. The acquisition of BorderWare will help the company make a play for organizations in the midtier, Aarrestad said. It will also put the company in position to compete with Cisco's IronPort unit as well as with Google's Postini business. 

"WatchGuard has a history of technology and market leadership in the multifunction security appliance space, and BorderWare offers innovative e-mail, messaging, content and Web security solutions," Jeff Wilson, an analyst at Infonetics Research, said in a statement. "The threat landscape is changing dramatically and customers are demanding easy-to-use security solutions with advanced firewall, VPN, Web and messaging security. The combined company will be well positioned to meet rigorous customer requirements." 

There are no plans for immediate changes to BorderWare's product offerings, customer support or channel programs, Aarrestad said. 

"We feel we're giving our customers additional choices and solutions to better protect their messaging systems … [and] to address the sort of evolving threat landscape," he said.