Thoma Bravo to buy Sophos for $3.9 billion

Thoma Bravo to buy Sophos for $3.9 billion
October 14, 2019
https://www.zdnet.com/article/thoma-bravo-to-buy-sophos-for-3-9-billion/

Sophos: Thoma Bravo Makes Offer to Acquire Sophos

 

All these billions of dollars for companies that produce nothing, malware writers must be on their payroll, I can't see any other explanation for the profitability of this industry, a cartel kind of structure. I'm certainly not going to pay a single cent in the future for an AV...

 

Two things come to mind with this development:

1. How do the devs of HitmanPro products feel about it and will this impact its future in some way/s?
2. Coincides roughly with the Sandboxie transition to open source.

Interesting.

 

Interesting development. But it's not necessarily bad news for a public company to be taken private!

https://www.institutionalinvestor.c...e-and-More-Public-Companies-Are-Going-Private

 

"...Thoma Bravo has done 230 software deals worth over $68 billion since 2003 and presently oversees a portfolio of 38 software companies that generate some $12 billion in annual revenue and employ 40,000 people...

In February 2019, the French business school HEC Paris, in conjunction with Dow Jones, named Thoma Bravo the best-performing buyout investor in the world after studying 898 funds raised between 2005 and 2014..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoma_Bravo

 

What's the likelihood that this dude will see fit to revitalize the development of sandboxie?

On one hand, a guy with that kind of money might throw a bone to the people who have been using sandboxie since the beginning to make customers happy.

On the other hand, he might be the kind of guy to nickel and dime the customers like crazy to have the sandboxie we all know and love.

 

I am almost sure that the guys over Thoma Bravo don't even know what Sandboxie is nor care about that.

 

I speculate but maybe Sophos turned Sandboxie out to pasture as a way to clean house for the new buyer. This thing didn't happen overnight. So, I am agreeable with Nightwalker's thoughts on it. Listen, I love Sandboxie, I love the software. But it seems it wasn't profitable any more, and to acqure the best price, you gotta do you.

 

Oh! Great! I'm so glad that huge companies with huge market shares can just be bought. First Sophos buys Surfright, then the company that owns sandboxie and now some other company no one has heard of is buying sophos.

The makers of Avast bought Piriform and the company that makes AVG, the one other well known free antivirus.

Competition in the cybersecurity industry incentivizes them all to constantly be in a race to one-up each other. Benefiting all consumers and corporate users at the same time

Microsoft: "Hey look! Windows defender has a super high detection rate! Cool, huh?"

Comodo: "Sit down noob! Our database is bad, but we have a product that uses a whitelist as well as a blacklist, If we don't know about it, we can still protect our users from it, Unlike you."

SecureAge: "Hey! We have whitelisting AND a super high detection rate! And now we've got M.L.A.I. too!"

Voodoosoft: "Yeah, my product is better than all of yours and only one guy is developing it."

And what do you think would happen to the protection quality of these products if they were all owned by the same company? Sure, AVG gets a higher detection rate than it used to, but that's only because the internal workings of it are almost identical to avast now. So now if avast doesn't detect something in the present moment, AVG won't be detecting it either.

 

Could you explain what you mean by "the guys over Thoma Bravo". I don't follow.

 

Well then I guess it's great that sandboxie is...hopefully...going to be open source. They're giving it back to the users. The only problem is that since its userbase has declined so much in recent years, I don't think many people will be using the source code.


I guess as long as your system's protection is up to snuff, then you don't really need something like sandboxie. To be honest, usually my other layers are the ones that catch threats, sandboxie served me as a means of separating different kinds of browsing data. And since comodo has a virtual desktop mode, I can still keep my computer and my files protected from anyone I lend it to.

 

I dont like those moves too, I cant remember when an aquisition had actually improved the quality of the product.

 

What you dont follow? The investment staff and the team responsible for the acquisition of Sophos are not buying it because of Sandboxie, there are no financial incentives to care about this niche software.
Invincea, Sandboxie and SurfRight are just collateral for this operation.

 

Exactly. One felt comfortable and reassured w/Sandboxie, like a literal security blanket. In hindsight, I was pretty bitter about Sophos and the protracted silence about SBIE and the activations server. Did anyone actually smell it out that Sophos was in the midst of a buyout? Not me, the last thing I suspected. So this now answers a mystery. Of course: yet another hush-hush corporate deal behind the curtains. I'm not looking for a replacement for SBIE any more but I'll give the anticipated 1909-compatible version a whirl.

 

So your answer is, "the guys over Thoma Bravo" = "the investment staff and the team responsible for the acquisition of Sophos". That's what I didn't follow.

 

"keep the best and sell the rest"
TB is a kind of locusts, they bought:
Imperva
Symantecs cert selling
Lexmark Enterprise Software
Qlik, Software for Business Intelligence
Riverbed
Barracuda Networks
and more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoma_Bravo

its like the "cage of lions" in germany ("Höhle der Löwen") where investors buy parts of interesting startups.
famous investors: Jochen Schweizer, Carsten Maschmeyer, Frank Thelen, Judith Williams.
guess how they got richer!? TB is the USA version.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Höhle_der_Löwen

this is the worst way to sell a product where here in germany because it has smarter options for those startups!

 

If he has billions of dollars, he's not in this to make people happy. He's in it to make dough, and he's not gonna make that by supporting Sandboxie.

 

Something just occurred to me, The paid version of sophos home is somewhat more expensive than a lot of other home paid stand alones and HMP.Alert & HMP are pretty expensive considering what little they really offer and how many professionals use those products.

I would've expected a corporation with the chops to buy two makers of other products like those in as short of time as they did would be worth more than just 3.9 billion.

The makers of sandboxie came out with a corporate security product called "invincea freespace" about a year before they got bought by sophos. And if even only one big corporation was using Invincea freespace to protect their computers, that's at minimum, millions of USD per year, depending on how many endpoints and servers that hypothetical company would have

 

Sophos

https://polaris.brighterir.com/public/sophos/news/rns/story/xeyn8jw

 

Similar approach to Blue Coat I guess, buy the firm and pair it with another. Keep an eye out on what TB have also purchased recently.

 

Thoma Bravo Acquires Sophos for $3.9bn
March 2, 2020
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/thoma-bravo-acquires-sophos-for/

Sophos: Sophos Announces Completion of Take-Private Acquisition by Thoma Bravo

 

Hope Surfright products are safe.

Edit: And for Sandboxie's ardent following, that it 'finds it's way' out there ...

 

Oh great! Now we have to deal with another company buying up a company that bought up a while bunch of other companies. This kind of crap should be illegal. Being able to eliminate competition by buying it.

 

Would HMPA be included?

 

Of course!