SecureWorks Nears VeriSign MSSP Deal

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VeriSign announced the sale in a May 26 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. When the deal is completed (assuming it gets competed…), we’ll add it to our MSPmentor M&A Tracker, a list of mergers and acquisitions across the managed services industry.

The SEC filing said the deal is expected to close on June 30. VeriSign also plans to offload its Global Security Consulting business, which provides risk assessment and security compliance services. VeriSign aims to pare down to focus on its core operations: domain name registration and authentication services.

VeriSign tapped services providers and VARs to resell its managed security services to enterprise customers. It’s hard to believe they felt particularly encouraged to do so, with the service line on the block for months. Atlanta-based SecureWorks, for its part, works with VAR/integrator solution partners. It’s unclear how the partner situation will sort out. A spokeswoman for SecureWorks said the company will hold off on comment until the transaction closes.

Both companies offer roughly the same suite of services: intrusion detection/intrusion prevention, vulnerability management, managed firewalls, log management and the like. SecureWorks and VeriSign appear to be like-minded when it comes to rollout out new services: VeriSign announced a Web application firewall management service in March; SecureWorks debuted theirs in April.

Scale in the form of data center assets and customers is mainly what’s in store for SecureWorks in the VeriSign deal. VeriSign’s managed security services customers of note include Xerox, an arrangement announced in 2008.

Contributing blogger John Moore covers Master MSPs and Web hosts, and has written about the IT channel for two decades. MSPmentor is updated multiple times daily. Follow us via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. And subscribe to our enewsletter, webcasts and Resource Center.