Verizon Business completes Cybertrust acquisition

Stuart Corner
Monday, 09 July 2007 10:37

IT Industry - Deals

The acquisition came at a good time for Verizon Business, Day said.  Cognisant of the need to offer a broad portfolio of security services, it was gearing up for a large scale regional rollout of  its offerings in the US and Europe, essentially those from NetSec, a company acquired by MCI (acquired by Verizon and which became Verizon Business) in 2003.

"The NetSec business is primarily US based with some in Europe. Those customers will over time be migrated onto the Cybertrust platform," Day said. "This resolves one of the biggest issues for us: professional services. The acquisition of Cybertrust gives us an extensive professional services network throughout Asia and Australia. Even with launching NetSec services it would have taken us a long time to build credibility and to build up resources."

O'Rourke added: "It would have been incredibly hard to go out and find 100 people to start a managed security services business."

In recent times a number of large security services providers have been bought by larger services companies: IBM has bought ISS, BT has bought Counterpane and EMC has bought RSA. O'Rourke commented: "The market has moved on from stand-alone security services. The whole environment has changed. If you look at the sweet spot of $100-$400 million revenue, there is only one stand-alone provider left, that is Endtrust.  I think the whole security  threat landscape has changed. It is more complex now: you need access to a full suite of services."

Going forward, he identified the hottest issue for 2008 as being application security. "Organisations are getting good at locking down the perimeter. That is where most of the money has been spent over the past five years. Now the biggest issues we find is data  breeches. We have seen hacking evolve over the last 24 months from hacking for fun to hacking for profit."