News
Cisco Completes Acquisition of Sourcefire
October 2013 by Marc Jacob
Cisco announced it has completed the acquisition of Sourcefire. With the close of this acquisition, Cisco will provide one of the industry’s most comprehensive advanced threat protection portfolios, as well as a broad set of enforcement and remediation options that are integrated, pervasive, continuous and open.
The increased scrutiny on security is being driven by the evolving trends of mobility, cloud computing, and advanced targeted attacks. More than the attacks themselves, a major consideration is the change in what defines a network, which goes beyond traditional firewalls and includes data centers, endpoints, virtual and mobile to make up the extended network. A threat-centric security model lets defenders address the full attack continuum, across all attack vectors, and respond at any time, all the time.
Cisco and Sourcefire customers will benefit from Cisco’s commitment to drive forward both the ASA and FirePOWER™ platforms. Cisco is also committed to open source innovation and will continue to support Snort®, ClamAV® and other open source projects.
With the completion of the transaction, Sourcefire employees join the Cisco Security Group led by Young. Additionally, Martin Roesch, founder and chief technology officer of Sourcefire, becomes vice president and chief architect for Cisco’s Security Group reporting directly to Young.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco is paying $76 per share in cash in exchange for each share of Sourcefire and assuming outstanding equity awards for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.7 billion, including retention-based incentives. Cisco expects the acquisition to be slightly dilutive to non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2014 due to normal purchase accounting adjustments and integration costs. All shares of Sourcefire are expected to be delisted from the NASDAQ stock market by the close of business today.
