At the end of July, McAfee announced its intentions to acquire anti-spam SaaS provider MX Logic for $140M (plus possibly $30M more based on an earn out). That brings the total acquisitions in the anti-spam (software and SaaS) acquisitions to over $4B since 2004. MX Logic had over 40K customers with over 4 million end users. MessageLabs, acquired by Symantec in Oct 2008, had sales of $145M, 19,000 customers (8 million users) in 86 countries (63% of its business from EMA). Timing is everything - MessageLabs with twice the end user base, was acquired by Symantec for $695M ($86 per customer versus the $34 per customer that MX Logic got). Who would have thought that this would be such a lucrative market? We always like to remind people that there are just a few hundred high volume spammers out there who have created over $3B in liquidity events in the past five years. (No wonder spam products don't completely shut down all spam and put spammers out of business - talk about co-conspirators...)
Anti-Spam Hall of Fame
