[December 21, 2004]

Cisco to Acquire Yet Another Security Firm

BY JOHANNE TORRES

Cisco Systems (quote - news - alert) announced today that it made its 2004 11th acquisition. The company is further expanding its portfolio of security management products by acquiring Protego Networks Inc. Protego, a privately-owned Sunnyvale, CA-based company, provides security monitoring and threat management appliances used in enterprise and small-to-medium business networks. The ability of Protego's products to detect, correlate and mitigate threats in the network is what attracted Cisco to fulfill its Self-Defending Network initiative.

"Cisco is committed to providing customers with end-to-end, multi-layered, and integrated security and Cisco's Self-Defending Network initiative builds proactive and advanced security capabilities directly into the network." said Richard Palmer, Vice President in Cisco's Security Technology Group. "The acquisition of Protego further emphasizes Cisco's commitment to network security and their leadership in security monitoring, threat management and mitigation complements our ongoing work in security."

Cisco’s acquisition is another multimillion dollar investment. The company is expected to pay approximately $65 million in cash for Protego. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2005, which ends on January 29, 2005.

Founded in 2002, Protego offers a family of appliances for threat management, monitoring and mitigation that are designed to enable customers to make better use of network and security devices by combining traditional security event monitoring with network intelligence, context correlation, vector analysis, anomaly detection, hotspot identification and automated mitigation capabilities. By combining network intelligence, an understanding of network topology and automated mitigation capabilities, Protego's products would help companies to readily and accurately identify and eliminate network attacks while maintaining network compliance.

Protego began a relationship with Cisco when it joined the company’s AVVID partner program. Both companies have been successfully working together to sell security products to customers. The Protego 38-employee team will be integrated into Cisco's Security Technology Group.

Cisco Systems, Inc.
www.cisco.com