Verizon Business completes Cybertrust acquisition

Stuart Corner
Monday, 09 July 2007 10:37

IT Industry - Deals

Verizon Business has completed its acquisition of Cybertrust and announced plans on how it will integrate Cybertrust's security offerings into its telecoms services business.

When it announced the deal in May   Verizon Business said it expected to close the deal in 60-90 days but has in fact achieved this in 45 days.

"During this time [since the announcement] we have had an integration committee in place and we have done an enormous amount of work," Darren Day, director Asia Pacific marketing for Verizon Business, told iTWire. "All the staff have letters of employment, we have defined the new structure and everybody is in their new roles across the globe."

The company claims to have 1,100 professionals deployed throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. "All the security personnel from Verizon Business have been moved into a security centre of excellence  reporting to Kerry Bailey, the former COO of Cybertrust," Day said.

It has over 2600 managed security services customers and 250,000 managed devices. "This makes Verizon Business number one globally by revenue for managed security services," Day said. Locally the four Cybertrust data centres will be retained, but staff offices will be combined. However in some cases this will mean Verizon staff moving to Cybertrust offices, such as Canberra where Cybertrust had over 100 staff, far more than Verizon Business.

Paul O'Rourke, general manger of Cybertrust in Australia, said: "Over the next two weeks all the staff will be trained in all the solutions so we see the integration as being wrapped up by the end of July."

When the deal was announced, Ovum's VP of US enterprise practice, Jan Dawson, commented: "Verizon Business will have to strike a careful balance between quickly bringing the benefits of the acquisition and the expanded portfolio of services to its customers and ensuring that the maximum value from both sides is preserved during the integration process."

Day said "In Asia we will pick up all the Cybertrust offerings on day one and add to those some of the security offerings we had in Asia. Globally, it is very similar...Where there was overlap Verizon will grandfather its business products and go with the Cybertrust products."