Cisco completes IronPort acquisition

NEW DELHI: Cisco today announced that it has completed the acquisition of privately held IronPort Systems Inc., provider of e-mail and web security products. The acquisition was announced in January 4, 2007, for $830 million in cash and stock.

IronPort’s products and technology enable Cisco to extend its Self-Defending Network strategy to now include Wide Traffic Inspection capabilities, ensuring a new approach that combines the depth of network-level security with the breadth of capabilities for inspecting e-mail, web and Instant Messaging traffic According to Richard Palmer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Technology Group, this evolution of the Self-Defending Network strategy will enable Cisco to provide customers with integrated end-to-end IT security never before offered from a single company.

“The acquisition of IronPort provides Cisco with a proven business that is already respected as a leader in the messaging and Web security space,” Palmer said. “The addition of IronPort represents the next chapter in the evolution of the Self-Defending Network, and it accelerates Cisco’s growth opportunities. Most important, it extends the solutions we can provide our customers as security threats and demands evolve.” Cisco’s vision for a Self-Defending Network is to incorporate protection into the entire network infrastructure (within its core routing and switching portfolio) and extend that protection from the network (at the packet level) to applications and content.

The addition of IronPort’s content security technology allows Cisco to provide Wide Traffic Inspection that integrates network and content analysis to stop the most sophisticated threats and protect all major application protocols, endpoints, and the network itself. Scott Weiss, former CEO of IronPort and now general manager of the IronPort Business Unit reporting to Palmer, said, “Our e-mail products are better because we have a web product and vice versa. Merging this technology into Cisco’s Self-Defending Network portfolio creates even more powerful solutions for the marketplace.”