NAI to Buy Back Complete Control of McAfee.com

Continuing his effort to refocus Network Associates Inc. and do away with any unnecessary management layers, CEO George Samenuk announced late Sunday that NAI will make a formal offer to buy back the 25 percent of McAfee.com shares that it doesnt already own.

McAfee.com shareholders will be entitled to 0.675 shares of NAI stock for each share of McAfee.com that they hold, the company said.

Once NAI owns 90 percent of McAfee.com, it will stop the buy-back process and commence an expedited merger process that will give it complete control of the company. NAI will make its offer March 25, and shareholders will have 20 business days in which to accept or decline the offer.

NAI executives said the buy-back is nothing more than the next step in Samenuks recovery plan.

“Ever since George took over, hes been looking a ways to focus the company on its core strengths,” said Kent Roberts, executive vice president and general counsel at NAI, based in Santa Clara, Calif. “The idea is that the customer will get an appropriately focused offering to meet its needs.”

One of Samenuks first actions after taking the reins early last year was to bring the MyCIO.com division back under the corporate umbrella. The division, which no longer exists, delivered security services over the Internet. Much of the MyCIO technology has lived on in the McAfee ASaP service.

Late last year, Samenuk decided to shutter the PGP division and sell off some of its products while folding the remaining ones into NAIs other business units. This was a significant move, given the storied past of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption software and the unique place it holds in the history of the security industry. However, the purchase of PGP never paid off the way NAI executives had anticipated it would, and the company ultimately sold a portion of it to Secure Computing Inc., and merged the rest into the McAfee and Sniffer units.