Symantec buys Blue Coat for $4.65bn

USA: Symantec has agreed to buy Blue Coat Systems in a $4.65 billion all-cash deal. The deal is expected to close in Q3.

Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will become Symantec's new CEO once the deal closes. Symantec was scouting for a new CEO after as Michael Brown stepped down in April.

PE firm Bain Capital, which is a majority owner of Blue Coat, will invest $750 million of the proceeds back into the combined company via convertible notes, while PE firm Silver Lake is doubling its Symantec investment to $1B via convertible notes.

This transaction will combine Symantec’s threat telemetry with Blue Coat’s networks and cloud security offerings to provide differentiated security solutions across hundreds of millions of endpoints and servers, and billions of email and web transactions.

Symantec will be also able to deliver security for the cloud generation of users, data and apps, for the cloud, from the cloud and to the cloud. The company’s data loss prevention capabilities will be applied at the web proxy and to over 12,000 cloud applications.

Greg Clark, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Coat, said, “Blue Coat is the trusted source for protecting billions of web transactions daily and is the clear leader in the growing cloud security market. Once combined, we will offer customers around the world – from large enterprises and governments to individual consumers – unrivaled threat protection and unmatched cloud security.”

“Together, we will be best positioned to address the ever-evolving threat landscape, the massive changes introduced by the shift to mobile and cloud, and the challenges created by regulatory and privacy concerns,” said Dan Schulman, Chairman of Symantec.

This will also bring together a formidable scale of investment in cyber R&D and threat research which spans over 3,000 engineers and researchers, as well as nine Threat Response Centers.