Trustwave Buys DLP Vendor Vericept

The data loss prevention market consolidated just a little bit more
yesterday with the announcement that Chicago-based Trustwave will purchase
Vericept, a Denver-based company specializing in DLP.

Known best by channel partners for its wide range of managed services and
compliance consulting, Trustwave says it picked up Vericept for the patented
Content Analysis Engine running its DLP
solution, which Gartner ranked in the Visionaries Quadrant in June. The
acquisition will bolster Trustwave’s position within the PCI DSS
compliance market, as Trustwave believes DLP
can help satisfy seven of the 12 security requirements laid out by PCI.

"We’re very excited to offer our customers a leading DLP
solution that can manage sensitive data, scale to meet expanding business
requirements and maintain high performance as business continues in real
time," says Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO
of Trustwave. "Vericept’s DLP
technology complements our current portfolio of security solutions offered to
our global customer base."

This is Trustwave’s second large acquisition in 2009. In February the
company acquired Mirage Networks, a leading network access control (NAC)
vendor.

The deal is indicative of the continuing M&A activity within the DLP
market as larger players look to integrate the technology into their more
wide-scale security offerings, a trend that Gartner predicted will carry on for
the coming years in its Magic Quadrant for Content Aware Data Loss Prevention,
published in June. At that time, Gartner analysts actually predicted a Vericept
deal sometime in the near future due to its inability to execute within a tough
economic climate.

“Many vendors of products unrelated to DLP
are embedding content-aware DLP technologies
in their suite offerings,” wrote report authors Eric Oulett and Paul Proctor.
“One indication of this trend is a significant amount of merger and acquisition
activity and other consolidation in this market, which Gartner expects to
continue.”

The Trustwave acquisition will mark the ninth major DLP
acquisition since 2006, the last big deals being last year’s purchases of
Orchestria by CA and Reconnex by McAfee. According to Proctor and Oulett, DLP
doesn’t have long to go before it is expected to commoditize. They believe the
market will see 50 percent reductions in price by 2011.