2009 started off with CA's acquisition of Data Loss Prevention vendor Orchestria for an undisclosed amount. That's the eighth DLP acquisition in 26 months bringing the total acquisition costs to over $800M and leaves only a few independent DLP vendors remaining. It's not clear how much the venture investors got out of this deal but it's likely that the range of the acquisition was $50M and that Orchestria had about $40M in venture capital investment. Those numbers are par for the course for most of the DLP acquisitions with the big exception being Vontu which sold itself to Symantec over a year ago for $350M, netting the investors a big return. This is CA's third acquisition in 90 days (the other two were IDFocus in the identity and role management space and Eurekify in the management space). With $2.4B in cash, CA may continue its shopping spree to broaden its product line. The DLP business has always been a difficult market for startups because what customers want (data protection) is much broader than what a DLP appliance can deliver. At about the same time that the DLP sector began, another group of companies started down the disk encryption path with a similar mission in mind — protecting customers' data — but with a simpler concept — encrypt the disk so that if a laptop gets lost or is stolen, the information is unavailable. Since 1% to 2% of laptops get lost or stolen each year, disk encryption makes sense as a first order response to protecting information. Organizations spent nearly ten times as much on disk encryption products than they did on DLP/ILP technology. And the exit results reflect this. While the eight DLP companies sold for a total valuation of $834M, three disk encryption companies were sold for $1.2B during the same timeframe.
