Today’s News: Intel to Acquire McAfee

Today Intel announced its plans to acquire McAfee. We believe this underscores that security is integral to online computing. Tomorrow’s computing promises vast computing resources, including hardware, critical data and applications, residing in the cloud, enabling people to access the data from web browsers using the devices of their choosing.

We see this acquisition as another example of the rapid consolidation taking place in the enterprise software industry as this new world emerges. This is a great exit for McAfee, as traditional high tech vendors are having an increasingly harder time competing against SaaS and cloud computing offerings. We saw McAfee using aggressive pricing against its competitors, such as Symantec, to steal market share and to be able to show double digit growth. Obviously, such a strategy was not sustainable. The traditional PC market is now also threatened by devices like iPad, mobile devices and new free OSes such as Android are gaining in functionality, while enterprise software and productivity suites are moving into the cloud.

Intel gains security expertise with this acquisition, and it will be interesting to see what they can do with the traditional McAfee enterprise software product lines. Intel talks about "hardware-enhanced security to counter sophisticated threats of tomorrow." With the rise of exciting portable technologies and devices that improve productivity in the workplace and for consumers, built-in security makes sense. We look forward to working with Intel and other companies to work together to keep internet computing secure.