Cisco has started off 2007 with a bang: buying Ironport Systems for a whopping $830 million in stock and cash. Ironport makes appliances for enterprises and helps them tackle the spyware problems and email spam amongst other things. The deal is an effort by Cisco to beef up Cisco Security Technology Group. Is this deal a sign that Cisco has its big “check book” out again?
As a backstory, the company raised over $100 million in venture funding. The buyout today is still more cash in the pockets of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and ex Hotmail-ers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith who were amongst the individual investors who participated in the initial round of funding.
3 comments so far
2:57 PM PT
Whoever can deliver on the foremost anti-spamware will be in a very powerful position - it’s only going to get worse until we all switch to IM communities!
If anyone is interested in helping develop a radical virtual company developing anti spyware and anti spam technology get in touch abelflint {at} yahoo {dot{ co {dot} uk
6:26 PM PT
I think state of anti-spam and anti spyware at the moment is just a never ending cat and mouse game, spyware and spam is getting more and more intellegent and this is probably something to look out for in 2007. Creative Spam and Spyware! .
Cisco might have made a good short term buy but I dont see how they will be able to be at the forefront of this war on spam and spyware for the long term. They should focus more on the network instead of whats going through it. Perhaps cisco is getting greedy ?.
7:24 PM PT
Can anyone post some links to understand how such companies are valued?
i read somewhere that one way is to calculate the price as a million per engineer. ironport has 407 ppl. so they paid 2 million per engineer?
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