Mumbai, June 15: It seems to an acusition Monday. With the buzz on Microsoft-LinkedIn deal has started fading away, Symantec said it would acquire threat-blocking service Blue Coat Systems for $4.65bn from Bain Capital, in the struggling antivirus company’s largest deal for more than a decade.
Greg Clark, Blue Coat chief executive, will take the top job at Symantec, a position that has been vacant since April. The combined company will be the world’s largest enterprise security business by revenues.
Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will take over as CEO of Symantec after the deal is closed, which is expected in the third calendar quarter. Symantec announced in April that its CEO, Michael Brown, was stepping down as president and CEO amid falling revenue and trimmed forecasts.
Investors backing the deal included private equity firm Silver Lake, which said it would double the $500 million investment in convertible notes in Symantec it announced in February.
The deal announced late Sunday comes after Blue Coat, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, earlier this month filed for an initial public offering of stock. “This transaction will combine Symantec’s leading threat telemetry with Blue Coat’s networks and cloud security offerings to provide differentiated security solutions across hundreds of millions of endpoints and servers, and billions of email and web transactions,” Symantec said in a statement.