McAfee completes acquisition of Foundstone

By combining the industry-leading technologies and services from Foundstone, McAfee now offers the industry's first comprehensive portfolio of dynamic risk management and mitigation solutions to protect IT infrastructures and optimize business availability.

This move follows the company's earlier decision to streamline its business and focus solely on security products and services. The company also changed its name from Network Associates to McAfee, Inc, to reinforce its image as a leader in security and intrusion prevention.

"Over the last few years McAfee has been involved in a significant transformation and the acquisition of Foundstone is another strong step forward," said Charles Kolodgy, research director with IDC, the premier global market intelligence and advisory firm to IT and telecoms industries. "With the combination of McAfee's intrusion prevention, secure content management solutions and Foundstone's vulnerability management, McAfee is on the leading edge of providing a complete set of advanced, proactive risk management and mitigation solutions."

According to IDC, the vulnerability assessment and management (VA&M) and intrusion detection market is expected to experience increasing growth over the next few years, reaching US$ 1.6 billion by 2008. The most significant growth is expected during the next three years. In a recent report titled, "Worldwide Security Software 2004-2008 Forecast", IDC identified Foundstone as a leader who is advancing the concepts of risk management, policy compliance and other trends. Foundstone was also noted as one of the fastest growing VA&M solution providers at 100 percent plus growth per year.

Commenting on the impact of these developments on operations in the Middle East, Patrick Hayati, Regional Director, Network Associates Middle East stated, "McAfee is a trusted and well-known name among consumers in the region, and the change in brand name has helped reinforce the company's strengths and visibility. The acquisition of Foundstone will leverage our ongoing sales efforts and help us focus on products to meet the new security challenges of blended threats. This acquisition allows us to consolidate our position as the only vendor to provide comprehensive solutions that allow organizations to not only assess business risk but also mitigate those risks."

Foundstone is a privately held company that was founded in 1999. The company offers a combination of enterprise software, appliances, consulting services, and education to help organizations protect their most important assets from critical threats. Foundstone's technology prioritizes and correlates assets, vulnerabilities, and threats, and supports proactive remediation to protect against critical threats. Foundstone also brings an elite Professional Services organization that will become part of the McAfee Expert Services team, which will be leveraged for deep security expertise and best practices to help businesses identify and prioritize valued assets and implement established methods to protect them.

Over the course of five years, Foundstone has built a customer base of more than 400 large enterprise customers including AT&T, McKesson, Motorola, and many high profile government agencies.

McAfee, Inc. is committed to supporting Foundstone customers and the continued development of the Foundstone technology. The company has begun to sell the full line of Foundstone products including Foundstone Enterprise, Foundstone FS1000 appliance and Foundstone On-demand Service. McAfee intends to integrate the products into its market-leading intrusion prevention technologies to deliver enhanced risk classification of prioritized assets, automated shielding and risk remediation, and automated policy enforcement and compliance. The Foundstone Professional Services organization will continue to offer market-leading security consulting and product services.