In 1997, McAfee bought encryption company PGP. In 2002, McAfee sold it... With the acquisition of SafeBoot, a private company based in the Netherlands, McAfee is back in the data encryption market. Is it a wise move ? Future will tell but SafeBoot has about 4200 customers according to McAfee. PGP claims it has... 80000 customers. For now we don't have to be sorry for McAfee: the antivirus software maker has about $1.4 billion in cash and spent "only" $350 millions for SafeBoot. "Customer demand for encryption is much higher today than it was when McAfee sold PGP, so now is the right time to acquire SafeBoot and make encryption a key part of our data security offering" said McAfee spokesman Joris Evers.

Data encryption became a big issue in 2006-2007 with several stories of losses of unencrypted data from corporate laptops. SafeBoot is specialized in data protection with solutions to encrypt files and folders, hard drives, as well as smart phones and PDAs. Dave DeWalt, McAfee’s president and CEO further said: "SafeBoot’s mobile security solutions address a critical painpoint for customers — the protection of confidential and proprietaryinformation. With the acquisition of SafeBoot, McAfee [taps into] the fast-growing $1 billion encryption market, and we will be ableto offer a complete data protection solution that combines SafeBoot’sdevice, full-disk, and content encryption with McAfee’s data lossprevention solutions". McAfee plans also to offer a suite of device protection and data security products targeted at mobile phones. SafeBoot will complement MacAfee's data-loss protection solution, under the management of ePolicy Orchestrator.

SafeBoot will become a new Data Protection product business unit headed by Safeboot's CEO Gerhard Watzinger, who will report to Dave De Walt. McAfee expects the acquisition to close in the fourth quarter pending regulatory reviews.

It could be the start of a series of acquisition as indicates MacAfee Joris Evers statement: "We continue to look at tuck-in acquisitions in the small tomedium category as one of the levers for building our product suite aspart of our broader approach to security risk management".