Cisco buys Sourcefire for $2.7 billion | Hacker News Reader

Cisco buys Sourcefire for $2.7 billion

scmagazine.com.au

10 pointsmaskofsanity6 comments

That's cool, but what I want to know is: when's Cisco gonna buy RedHat? I think that's a blockbuster acquisition that would make a ton of sense for Cisco. I think it's a question of price and whether RedHat would sell.

Time will tell.

In terms of company culture, Cisco and RedHat don't seem very aligned. Cisco is all proprietary and RedHat mostly doing free software.

IMHO, if you poke around in the Nexus 7K gear, it looks like RHEL or CentOS underneath. Cisco's always been very private about the kind of Linux they're running on their gear, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was modified RHEL.

RedHat does free Software, but their culture is services, which aligns well with Cisco. You don't get to be a billion dollar business without making some money somewhere.

Free software != $0 revenue.

This exemplifies Cisco's build/buy/partner model.The acquisition of Sourcefire adds a team with deep security DNA to Cisco and will accelerate Cisco’s security strategy of defending, discovering, and remediating advanced threats. In addition, Sourcefire’s open source model will strengthen and accelerate Cisco’s ability to build a strong ecosystem of security partners who can bring real time threat intelligence and innovations to customers through integration with it's technologies and platforms (OpenDaylight, SDN, etc...). Good move at a reasonable price (~29% premium to closing).

Sourcefire's flagship product is Snort which is an excellent Open Source Intrusion Detection System. Their business model is to offer management tools, rules and support on Snort for enterprises.

Their 2012 earnings were $223.1m which was a 35% increase over 2011. With cash and near-cash of around $200m, this is a purchase price of around 10x annual revenue.

That's an impressive business, I didn't realize they were doing so well.

Cisco obviously has a long history of buying network appliance (no caps) companies, including those that sell competing products. Sometimes the product lines are incorporated, sometimes they're run in parallel, and sometimes they're squashed (after Cisco's internal EOL promissory schedule, hopefully).

What Cisco does not do often is buy companies with open source products.

I think it's clear that Cisco needs to make big changes to their organization. I wonder if this signals that they are heading toward an IBM-style services model, or an Oracle-style scorched earth model...

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