Symantec Plans to Acquire Blue Coat Systems For $4.56 billion

By Steve Morgan, founder and CEO at Cybersecurity Ventures.

The Wall Street Journal broke news today that Symantec (NASDAQ:SYMC) plans to acquire Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BCSI) for $4.56 billion. Symantec will gain a new CEO with the acquisition.
Greg Clark is CEO and sits on the board of directors at Blue Coat.  He will become CEO of the combined companies once the purchase is complete.  Clark told the Wall Street Journal that “there’s virtually no product overlap between Blue Coat and Symantec”. His comment should be of grave concern to Symantec’s shareholders, employees, and executive management — not to mention the media and cyber market watchers.
The first thing that jumps off the websites of the two companies is product overlap. Most large cyber firms have some sort of ‘security platform’ to describe their product and service offerings.  These platforms are often more of a logical description of the point products a company offers, rather than any true integrated operation between the products.  Sometimes there is integration – or there can be a dashboard which provides a view into each of the products. Regardless, the platform is a singular marketing view of what a company provides.

• Advanced Web & Cloud Security
• Advanced Threat Protection
• Encrypted Traffic Management
• Incident Response, Analytics & Forensics
• Protecting Web Applications
• Network Performance & Optimization

Symantec’s products (sans a platform as of yet) are as follows:

• Threat Protection
• Information Protection
• Cyber Security Services
• Website Security

Symantec’s new CEO is making a potentially irrevocable blunder if he stands behind his assertion that there’s no overlap between the two firms. It will beg researchers, analyst firms, and the financial media to dig deep into each category by company (i.e. malware, encryption, etc.) and line up the product overlaps.