Thoma Bravo to buy Sophos for $3.9 billion

Discussion in 'other anti-malware software' started by guest, Oct 14, 2019.

  1. guest

    guest Guest

    Thoma Bravo to buy Sophos for $3.9 billion
    October 14, 2019
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/thoma-bravo-to-buy-sophos-for-3-9-billion/
    Sophos: Thoma Bravo Makes Offer to Acquire Sophos
     
  2. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    All these billions of dollars for companies that produce nothing, malware writers must be on their payroll, I can't see any other explanation for the profitability of this industry, a cartel kind of structure. I'm certainly not going to pay a single cent in the future for an AV...
     
  3. plat

    plat Registered Member

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    Two things come to mind with this development:

    1. How do the devs of HitmanPro products feel about it and will this impact its future in some way/s?
    2. Coincides roughly with the Sandboxie transition to open source.

    Interesting.
     
  4. Tinstaafl

    Tinstaafl Registered Member

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    Interesting development. But it's not necessarily bad news for a public company to be taken private!

    https://www.institutionalinvestor.c...e-and-More-Public-Companies-Are-Going-Private

     
  5. hawki

    hawki Registered Member

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    "...Thoma Bravo has done 230 software deals worth over $68 billion since 2003 and presently oversees a portfolio of 38 software companies that generate some $12 billion in annual revenue and employ 40,000 people...

    In February 2019, the French business school HEC Paris, in conjunction with Dow Jones, named Thoma Bravo the best-performing buyout investor in the world after studying 898 funds raised between 2005 and 2014..."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoma_Bravo
     
  6. GrDukeMalden

    GrDukeMalden Registered Member

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    What's the likelihood that this dude will see fit to revitalize the development of sandboxie?

    On one hand, a guy with that kind of money might throw a bone to the people who have been using sandboxie since the beginning to make customers happy.

    On the other hand, he might be the kind of guy to nickel and dime the customers like crazy to have the sandboxie we all know and love.
     
  7. Nightwalker

    Nightwalker Registered Member

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    I am almost sure that the guys over Thoma Bravo don't even know what Sandboxie is nor care about that.
     
  8. plat

    plat Registered Member

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    I speculate but maybe Sophos turned Sandboxie out to pasture as a way to clean house for the new buyer. This thing didn't happen overnight. So, I am agreeable with Nightwalker's thoughts on it. Listen, I love Sandboxie, I love the software. But it seems it wasn't profitable any more, and to acqure the best price, you gotta do you.
     
  9. GrDukeMalden

    GrDukeMalden Registered Member

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    Oh! Great! I'm so glad that huge companies with huge market shares can just be bought. First Sophos buys Surfright, then the company that owns sandboxie and now some other company no one has heard of is buying sophos.

    The makers of Avast bought Piriform and the company that makes AVG, the one other well known free antivirus.

    Competition in the cybersecurity industry incentivizes them all to constantly be in a race to one-up each other. Benefiting all consumers and corporate users at the same time

    Microsoft: "Hey look! Windows defender has a super high detection rate! Cool, huh?"

    Comodo: "Sit down noob! Our database is bad, but we have a product that uses a whitelist as well as a blacklist, If we don't know about it, we can still protect our users from it, Unlike you."

    SecureAge: "Hey! We have whitelisting AND a super high detection rate! And now we've got M.L.A.I. too!"

    Voodoosoft: "Yeah, my product is better than all of yours and only one guy is developing it."

    And what do you think would happen to the protection quality of these products if they were all owned by the same company? Sure, AVG gets a higher detection rate than it used to, but that's only because the internal workings of it are almost identical to avast now. So now if avast doesn't detect something in the present moment, AVG won't be detecting it either.
     
  10. Page42

    Page42 Registered Member

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    Could you explain what you mean by "the guys over Thoma Bravo". I don't follow.
     
  11. GrDukeMalden

    GrDukeMalden Registered Member

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    Well then I guess it's great that sandboxie is...hopefully...going to be open source. They're giving it back to the users. The only problem is that since its userbase has declined so much in recent years, I don't think many people will be using the source code.


    I guess as long as your system's protection is up to snuff, then you don't really need something like sandboxie. To be honest, usually my other layers are the ones that catch threats, sandboxie served me as a means of separating different kinds of browsing data. And since comodo has a virtual desktop mode, I can still keep my computer and my files protected from anyone I lend it to.
     
  12. Nightwalker

    Nightwalker Registered Member

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    I dont like those moves too, I cant remember when an aquisition had actually improved the quality of the product.
     
  13. Nightwalker

    Nightwalker Registered Member

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    What you dont follow? The investment staff and the team responsible for the acquisition of Sophos are not buying it because of Sandboxie, there are no financial incentives to care about this niche software.
    Invincea, Sandboxie and SurfRight are just collateral for this operation.
     
  14. plat

    plat Registered Member

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    Exactly. One felt comfortable and reassured w/Sandboxie, like a literal security blanket. In hindsight, I was pretty bitter about Sophos and the protracted silence about SBIE and the activations server. Did anyone actually smell it out that Sophos was in the midst of a buyout? Not me, the last thing I suspected. So this now answers a mystery. Of course: yet another hush-hush corporate deal behind the curtains. :doubt: I'm not looking for a replacement for SBIE any more but I'll give the anticipated 1909-compatible version a whirl.
     
  15. Page42

    Page42 Registered Member

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    So your answer is, "the guys over Thoma Bravo" = "the investment staff and the team responsible for the acquisition of Sophos". That's what I didn't follow.
     
  16. Brummelchen

    Brummelchen Registered Member

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    "keep the best and sell the rest"
    TB is a kind of locusts, they bought:
    Imperva
    Symantecs cert selling
    Lexmark Enterprise Software
    Qlik, Software for Business Intelligence
    Riverbed
    Barracuda Networks
    and more
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoma_Bravo

    its like the "cage of lions" in germany ("Höhle der Löwen") where investors buy parts of interesting startups.
    famous investors: Jochen Schweizer, Carsten Maschmeyer, Frank Thelen, Judith Williams.
    guess how they got richer!? TB is the USA version.
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Höhle_der_Löwen

    this is the worst way to sell a product where here in germany because it has smarter options for those startups!
     
  17. Beyonder

    Beyonder Registered Member

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    If he has billions of dollars, he's not in this to make people happy. He's in it to make dough, and he's not gonna make that by supporting Sandboxie.
     
  18. GrDukeMalden

    GrDukeMalden Registered Member

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    Something just occurred to me, The paid version of sophos home is somewhat more expensive than a lot of other home paid stand alones and HMP.Alert & HMP are pretty expensive considering what little they really offer and how many professionals use those products.

    I would've expected a corporation with the chops to buy two makers of other products like those in as short of time as they did would be worth more than just 3.9 billion.

    The makers of sandboxie came out with a corporate security product called "invincea freespace" about a year before they got bought by sophos. And if even only one big corporation was using Invincea freespace to protect their computers, that's at minimum, millions of USD per year, depending on how many endpoints and servers that hypothetical company would have
     
  19. ankupan

    ankupan Registered Member

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    Sophos

    https://polaris.brighterir.com/public/sophos/news/rns/story/xeyn8jw
     
  20. Payne747

    Payne747 Registered Member

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    Similar approach to Blue Coat I guess, buy the firm and pair it with another. Keep an eye out on what TB have also purchased recently.
     
  21. guest

    guest Guest

    Thoma Bravo Acquires Sophos for $3.9bn
    March 2, 2020
    https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/thoma-bravo-acquires-sophos-for/
    Sophos: Sophos Announces Completion of Take-Private Acquisition by Thoma Bravo
     
  22. paulderdash

    paulderdash Registered Member

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    Hope Surfright products are safe.

    Edit: And for Sandboxie's ardent following, that it 'finds it's way' out there ...
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2020
  23. GrDukeMalden

    GrDukeMalden Registered Member

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  24. Circuit

    Circuit Registered Member

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    Would HMPA be included?
     
  25. Bertazzoni

    Bertazzoni Registered Member

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    Of course!
     
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