Cisco continues the shopping spree

Cisco continues its trip down the M&A supermarket aisle, dropping companies into the basket. Today they announced that they bought IronPort and e-mail security appliance vendor for 830m.  For a security company this is actually a pretty big acquisition for Cisco, probably bigger than they have done before in security.  Iron Port touts itself as a security appliance vendor and sells a spam blocker box that is a hardened appliance.  Frankly, I think their real value is in the database they maintain of a white list of ISP's and mailers.  Iron Port licenses that database to open source users.  I wonder how long that will last once Cisco holds the keys.

I think this will signal a land grab in the anti-spam business.  Look for something with Barracuda, Postini and some of the other anti-spam crowd.  Consolidation will continue in security and we will all be assimilated. Resistance is futile.