- Village Gamer - http://villagegamer.net -

Third Brigade Acquired By Trend Micro

Third Brigade [1] OttawaTrend Micro Incorporated [2], a leader in network antivirus and Internet content security software and services, announced today a definitive agreement to acquire the Third Brigade [1] business, a privately-held security and compliance software company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Trend Micro is buying the business to accelerate its dynamic datacenter security strategy, and to provide customers Trend Micro [2]with access to critical security and compliance software and vulnerability response services. These all contribute to protecting physical, virtual and cloud servers, and corporate endpoints, from sophisticated malware and malicious activity. The acquisition is subject to certain approvals, and is expected to close in the 2nd quarter of 2009. Financial terms are not disclosed.

“Trend Micro has been a pioneer and global leader in server protection software for over ten years,” said Eva Chen, CEO, Trend Micro. “This acquisition underscores our commitment to maintaining that leadership position, and accelerates our ongoing efforts to deliver innovative new solutions that are uniquely suited to dynamic datacenters, as they expand from physical to virtual and public/private cloud-computing environments.”

Third Brigade products and technology complement and extend Trend Micro malware protection for dynamic datacenter environments. They offer increased security, improved performance and deployment convenience to organizations and service providers using virtualization in datacenters, including private and public cloud environments. And they allow datacenter administrators to use and protect their virtualization investments, and maximize their costs savings through higher consolidation rates, more timely and efficient patching, and reduced compliance costs.

Third Brigade also provides a proven, best-of-breed, host-based intrusion defense system for protecting endpoints from zero-day malware, which complements and layers on top of Trend Micro’s suite of content security technologies and products powered by the Smart Protection Network, a next generation cloud-client content security infrastructure designed to protect customers from Web and other threats. For the past 18 months, Trend Micro and Third Brigade have been collaborating closely on the Intrusion Defense Firewall product, which seamlessly plugs into the Trend Micro OfficeScan™ architecture and is available in 9 languages.

Third Brigade also complements and extends Trend Micro’s solutions for PCI, allowing organizations to quickly and cost-effectively meet PCI compliance requirements by addressing six of the 12 PCI requirements in a single, centrally managed software solution, and by providing detailed, auditable reports that document prevented attacks and policy compliance status.

“Our shared passion for excellence and Trend Micro’s commitment to Third Brigade’s products, partners and customers were paramount in making this decision,” said Wael Mohamed, President and CEO of Third Brigade. “Our common vision for extending proven security and compliance techniques across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, combined with Trend Micro’s substantial industry, channel, and financial strengths will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation while reaching a global market of partners and customers. We’re extremely proud and excited to be part of the Trend Micro team.”

Third Brigade customers include Fortune 500 leaders in retail, and aerospace and defense, as well as healthcare and financial services companies, and federal and state government agencies. These organizations rely on Third Brigade to detect, block and log attacks that target critical systems and endpoints, prevent business disruptions, enable compliance with key regulations and standards including PCI, and support operational cost reductions that are increasingly important in the current economic climate.

“Third Brigade has leading-edge security and compliance solutions that allow Global 2000, SMBs and government organizations to better address the needs of their next-generation datacenters, and corporate endpoints,” continued Eva Chen. “These align with Trend Micro’s mission of delivering the most flexible and customizable Internet security solutions to address the ever-changing threats on the Web.”

In the past year, Third Brigade has received significant recognition and certification. Third Brigade was recently identified by CIOmagazine.com as one of 10 virtualization vendors to watch in 2009. Its Deep Security product was recognized by eWeek as one of the ten hottest products, selected from 450 exhibitors, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week. The host intrusion prevention module of Deep Security was also the first to achieve certification for Evaluation Assurance Level 3 Augmented (EAL 3+) and it achieved certification across more platforms (Microsoft® Windows®, Solaris™, Linux™) than any other host-based intrusion prevention product.

Trend Micro is committed to the Third Brigade existing product roadmap and will continue to offer its stand-alone products for the near term as well as gradually integrate select Third Brigade capabilities into its own products and solutions. The Third Brigade office in Ottawa will become the new headquarters of Trend Micro Canada Technologies, Inc, operating as a subsidiary of Trend Micro U.S.