Sophos completes Utimaco acquisition

Sophos has completed its acquisition of German-based data security and encryption vendor Utimaco Safeware.

At this stage, Utimaco has revealed the deal closed at 214 million euros (A$380 million) but said the full financial details will be disclosed in an official announcement on Friday.

Utimaco’s Australia & New Zealand regional manager, Colin Lim said Sophos successfully purchased 75.5 percent of Utimaco’s shares, and secured the take-over bid.

Marc Wilczek, managing director APAC at Utimaco made the announcement during a press conference in Sydney today.

“After being independent for 25 years Sophos has acquired Utimaco and we are now part of the Sophos group,” said Wilczek.

Utimaco provides policy enforcement and protects end-points to help defend against intentional or unintentional loss of sensitive or confidential data.

This takeover furthers Sophos’s security and control strategy to protect organisations from external threats and careless or malicious end-user behaviour, the vendor claimed.

Rob Forsyth managing director at Sophos Australia said it’s absolutely a natural evolution for security control to complete this acquisition.

Pointsec and Safeboot, Utimaco’s closest data security competitors were snapped up by Checkpoint in 2006 and McAfee in 2007, respectively.

"Information security should be as commonplace as anti-virus protection - no longer a nice to have, but a must have. Companies of all sizes are looking to protect against both external and internal threats, with one manageable solution," said Steve Munford, CEO of Sophos in July.

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