Arcsight Acquired by HP for 1.5 Billion

That’s a whole lotta cash for a security company. As a comparison, Intel recently purchased McAfee for 7.68 Billion.

From Bloomberg here:

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s biggest personal-computer maker, agreed to buy ArcSight Inc. for about $1.5 billion in cash to gain security software.

ArcSight investors will receive $43.50 a share, Palo Alto, California-based HP said today in a statement. That’s 24 percent more than the stock’s Sept. 10 closing price.

The deal follows purchases by HP in areas such as services, networking equipment and smartphones, lessening its dependence on lower-margin computers and servers. ArcSight, a maker of software used to identify suspicious activity on a corporate network, may help HP better incorporate security features into other products.

ArcSight is a complicated and expensive event management system that is supposed to highlight security events across your infrastructure. The product only works if you spend massive manhours to tune it and maintain its database which often chokes to a slow crawl. They managed to penetrate the market deeply enough that their product became a defacto standard in most SOC environments.

Good for Arcsight to be able to get acquired by a good company. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.