McAfee's Big News

Monday McAfee announced its plans to acquire full-disk encryption software maker SafeBoot for $350M in cash just days before SafeBoot was about to complete its IPO.  It's a bold move for McAfee's new CEO Dave DeWalt and it's more or less his announcement that he's planning on broadening McAfee's focus. SafeBoot is one of the leaders in the $400+M mobile encryption market and McAfee's 125M endpoints should be an ideal way to grow this franchise. What's more, McAfee says it's planning to integrate SafeBoot technology with its Data Loss Prevention (DLP) product line -- last year McAfee acquired Onigma and used it as the basis for its DLP product family -- which probably will be the impetus for others in the DLP space to add encryption to their client side products -- and in the process broadening up that category to Data Protection (no "L" anymore).