• Sophos Acquires Internet Security Appliance Maker Astaro

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Friday, May 6th, 2011

    UK-based security software maker Sophos has acquired Astaro, a privately-held provider of network security solutions.

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Astaro booked $56 million in billings last year, which makes it the fourth largest dedicated unified threat management (UTM) provider in the world.

    Astaro was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany and Wilmington, USA. The company currently boasts more than 220 employees in nine countries, including a significant presence in the EMEA region.

    The company raised a total of $12.9 million from Wellington Partners, Insight Venture Partners and OpenView Venture Partners.

    The network security appliance maker says it has completed over 56,000 installations in over 60 countries, protecting business, school and government networks against a variety of IT security threats such as data theft, viruses, spyware and spam.

    Astaro also boasts a network of over 2,500 channel partners.

    With the acquisition of Astaro, Sophos aims to deliver coordinated protection and policy between endpoint and network to its clients, along with integrated management and reporting.