Today we announced that Sophos has acquired Cyberoam, a leading UTM company headquartered in Ahmedabad, India. I just wanted to share a few thoughts about the announcement, and mention some of the reasons why I think bringing Sophos and Cyberoam together is an exciting combination for our two companies, as well as for our customers, our partners, and the industry as a whole.
This transaction brings together two highly successful companies in network security, and positions us well to succeed further in this dynamic and fast-growing market. We believe Cyberoam and Sophos are a compelling combination in several key respects:
- The right market: This represents Sophos “doubling down” on our commitment to the network security market.
- The right technology: Cyberoam’s technology has a similar product architecture as our Sophos UTM, which will aid in longer-term integration. And each company has a variety of complementary technologies that offer opportunities to sell new and differentiated products.
- The right place: Cyberoam allows us to scale our engineering efforts with a strong and highly innovative product engineering center in India; expands our resources in UTM-oriented sales, marketing, customer support, and operations; and allows us to drive growth in several emerging markets, including India, the Middle East and Africa, where Cyberoam has a particularly strong presence.
- The details of the offer are set out in the announcement, which is available at investors.sophos.com. Consequently, as indicated at the time of the announcement, no interim dividend is proposed. Chief Executive Officer, Kris Hagerman, commented.
- CEO Kris Hagerman on Sophos' rapid rise towards the FTSE 100. We look forward to celebrating other important cultural milestones and celebrations throughout the year at Sophos, supported by the fantastic efforts of our Multicultural Awareness Employee Resource Group.
- Sophos stops everything malicious and provides us with alerts, so we can respond quickly—and that’s worth its weight in gold.” Cliff Hogan, CIO, D4C Dental Brands Switching to Sophos Central was a simple transition and 80% of the work was carried out within just one week.”.
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Kris Hagerman Sophos
Our goal in coming together is very simple: to expand and accelerate on the success that each company is already enjoying today. According to IDC, the UTM market is approximately $2.5 billion and growing at 20% per year. Both Cyberoam and Sophos are performing very well in the UTM market, and outgrowing our competitors. But our ambition is to become a much larger player in network security – not only in UTM, but in a number of exciting adjacent markets that are growing as fast or even faster, like next-generation firewall (NGFW), advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, and wireless security.
In terms of our integration plans, our approach is simple: “Business as usual – but better.” We don’t expect to make any changes to either company’s 2014 UTM product roadmaps. Over time, we will certainly look for opportunities to leverage the best of both companies to enhance our existing products and to add new products to our roadmap.
You will hear more in the days and weeks to come as to why we feel this combination is great news for our customers, our partners, and the industry as a whole. In the meantime, I encourage you to watch the short video from me and Hemal Patel, the CEO of Cyberoam, that provides a bit more background on the transaction and why we’re excited about it. If you are a Sophos customer, please check our FAQ for more background. And if you’re a partner, be sure to visit the Sophos Partner Portal or Cyberoam Partner Portal for more information.
Kris Hagerman Sophos Cloud
We have an exciting road ahead of us at Sophos, and I am thrilled to have the Cyberoam team on board to help us accelerate our momentum.
Yours sincerely,
Kris Hagerman, Sophos CEO