Symantec's acquisiton of Blue Coat comes to a close

Cybersecurity and systems management solutions provider Symantec announced that it has closed the deal with Blue Coat for $4.65 billion as both the companies entered into an agreement in the month of June this year. With this acquisition, Symantec aims to expand its product portfolio to protect customers from cyber threats. The transaction will integrate Symantec’s threat telemetry along with Blue Coat’s networks and cloud security offerings in order to offer a separate security solution. Greg Clark, Symantec CEO said:

At a time when the world faces more threats than it’s ever encountered before, I couldn’t be more confident in our ability to deliver what our customers need or more honored to lead Symantec’s next chapter of innovation and growth. With Blue Coat now part of Symantec, we are well positioned to solve the industry’s most difficult challenges of securing a mobile workforce, protecting the cloud and stopping advanced threats.

“Since announcing the transaction, our integration planning teams have been working diligently to capture the strengths of both companies. With our increased scale, portfolio and resources, large enterprises can now look to Symantec as a single strategic source for integrated solutions across endpoints, cloud and infrastructure to defend against sophisticated attacks and create a stronger, more cost-efficient security posture,” added Clark. Symantec claims it will tackle three of the biggest security challenges which its customers are facing with the help of Blue Coat:

• Staying ahead of advanced threats
• Securing the mobile workforce
• Helping customers securely embrace the cloud

According to Symantec, its plans to acquire Blue Coat started nearly two years ago, in order to become a full-fledged cybersecurity company. Based upon its ESG research of cybersecurity and IT professionals it saw the prospects of getting access to the larger and more comprehensive cyber security portfolio from a combined Symantec-Blue Coat entity. Matthew Gyde,Executive of Security, Dimension Data’s Group said, “The global security landscape is becoming more complex, and threats more pervasive, while at the same time, our clients are looking for business outcomes. We’re seeing an increase in the adoption of cloud services for security, and clients also see potential cost-savings of moving to the cloud. The Symantec and Blue Coat combination is an exciting opportunity for the security industry, and particularly for our clients. We look forward to working together to help our clients accelerate their ambitions.”