Charles Hudson's Weblog

I like merger speculation as much as the next person. Oracle and Peoplesoft is a very interesting merger and I believe it will eventually happen. The recent chatter about Sun and Novell is equally interesting, but much less likely. One merger that I think SHOULD happen is that Cisco should buy Trend Micro.

Trend Micro has some of the best security technology out there, period- Trend Micro has some of the best desktop and enterprise security technology in the market today. They are aggressively building out new products to deal with network security, especially when it comes to dealing with worms and non-virus variants. The two companies are already working together on a number of initiatives, including a gateway device.

Obvious convergence of networking and security – This is barely worth mentioning, but it is clear that security and networking are converging. Juniper, with its NetScreen acquisition in place, is one of the leading champions of this convergence. As security becomes a critical component of QoS, networking vendors are waking up to why they should care about and integrate security functionality.

But the real reason for this merger to happen is that I believe that the sum of the parts would be greater than the whole. For all of its technical leadership, Trend does not command the market cap of a Symantec. Trend has a strong brand in the enterprise space and is a relative unknown in the consumer space.

Buying Trend would give Cisco a strong presence in a handful of key markets, including desktop and gateway security. From reading Cisco’s messaging about their views on security, it seems to me that they have a real interest in having both network and endpoint security solutions. That’s why they are buying up companies like Twingo Systems and others.

I don’t know if this will ever happen, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

Email me at blog at charleshudson.net