Singtel has officially closed its acquisition of security vendor Trustwave. When the deal was first announced in April of this year, the value was estimated at $810 million, which was adjusted on closing to $770 million to account for working capital and other adjustments.
With the deal closed, Trustwave’s reach now expands globally alongside Singtel’s operations.
“I’m still the CEO of the company, and it’s still called Trustwave and it is being run as a separate entity,” Robert McCullen, president and CEO of Trustwave, told eWEEK. “I think of Singtel as a strategic investor, where we have access to their customers in Asia and that will help us to fund our growth internationally.”
The Singtel Group includes Singtel Telecom in Singapore, Optus Telecom in Australia and equity stakes in four additional telecommunications companies across Asia, according to McCullen. The reach of the Singtel Group provides a new distribution channel for Trustwave’s security services and products. The Singtel Group itself is majority-owned by Temasek Holdings, which in turn is owned by the government of Singapore.
“We’ll become the global cyber-security platform for the Singtel Group,” McCullen said.
Part of Trustwave’s business is a managed security service provider (MSSP) platform, which McCullen said has been his company’s fastest growing area in the last few years. As part of Singtel, the MSSP business will accelerate further. Trustwave is already doing joint training and sales calls with Singtel staff to help bring its security service to market.
Trustwave has also been active in North America—in particular, helping organizations achieve compliance requirements including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) data security standard for payments. With Singtel’s global reach, McCullen said that Trustwave is also looking at some financial services regulations as well as other regulatory requirements around health care.
McCullen said Trustwave will continue to invest in product development and will look in particular to increase its investments in secure email, Web Application Firewall (WAF) and access control technologies. Trustwave will also be looking at expanding its efforts to secure the emerging Internet of things (IoT) world.
“You’ll see us offering new products and services over time. An example of that is monitoring of new Internet devices,” he said. “Singtel is one of the leaders in helping develop a smart city for Singapore, and we’ll be an integral part of helping to provide security.”
McCullen explained that the Singapore smart city effort is an IoT initiative in that it includes everything from traffic lights to health care. He expects that Trustwave will learn from the Singapore smart city effort and then be able to apply those lessons globally.
“We have a lot of research capabilities through our SpiderLabs group, which can test devices,” McCullen said. “And then we can enhance our endpoint technologies, monitoring and alerts system through our global Security Operations Centers to help provide a service to help consumers and businesses.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.