VeriSign and Certicom Corp announced they have entered into an arrangement agreement whereby VeriSign will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Certicom for C$2.10 per share. At current exchange rates, the price is equivalent to US$1.67 per share. The aggregate purchase price is approximately C$92 million/US$73 million, or C$50 million/US$40 million, net of Certicom's existing cash and short-term marketable securities.

The agreed transaction price represents a premium of approximately 26% over the closing price of Certicom's common shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange ("TSX") on January 22, 2009. It also represents a premium of approximately 40% over an unsolicited takeover bid for the Common Shares, prior to its termination, by a wholly owned subsidiary of Research in Motion Limited.

With the acquisition of Certicom, VeriSign will gain a leadership position in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technology, which is generally recognized as a highly efficient form of public-key encryption. Together, VeriSign and Certicom expect to leverage VeriSign's reach to pursue emerging market opportunities in which ECC can efficiently enable secure data communications.

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MicroWorld has proclaimed an exciting sales promotion titled ‘Golden Bonanza 2009” for its registered premium partners in India to be effective from January 1st 2009 to March 31st, 2009.

The scheme is open to all MicroWorld Premium Partners (MPPs) who register on or before January 31 2009. The registrations can be done through authorized MDPs (MicroWorld Diamond Partners), MGPs (MicroWorld Gold Partners) or directly with MicroWorld at www.mspl.net .To qualify for the scheme, all registered MPPs should buy only from MDPs and MGPs in their respective regions. All claims will be settled, subject to the qualifying criteria and standard of verification, from MicroWorld. The scheme is applicable for dealers and resellers only.

Speaking at the occasion, Mr. Anil Gupta, Head—National Sales, Microworld said, “The dealers and resellers are the backbone of our distribution system and they help us reach to our customers. In order to acknowledge their contribution and reward them for their loyalty & excellent sales performance, MicroWorld has introduced this new scheme. This scheme will also help us in forming a personal connect with all our channel partners & strengthen our channel network”.

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Unistal Systems revealed an effective restructuring of its product and channel strategy to further strengthen its business. Post its recent tie-up with BitDefender, Unistal's product portfolio has become even more formidable. It now has a slew of effective data care, data recovery, and protection and security products available.

The five categories Unistal has re-organized its product offerings into are: BitDefender Anti-Virus 2009, BitDefender Internet Security 2009, Protegent 360, Protegent PC, Crash Proof + BitDefender Internet Security.

According to Mr. Alok Gupta, Managing Director, Unistal Systems, "BitDefender has an equally rich product portfolio as ours and with so many individual products and combinations available, it was prudent for us to restructure the product categories from a channel and end-user perspective such that more clarity and business growth is achieved. Users and channel partners shall now be able to make their product choices better. "Besides, this is in perfect accordance with market classification that has emerged in the recent past (individual, SOHO, SME and enterprise customer categories), not to forget the prevailing market dynamics."

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Aujas Networks has recently publicized that Dr CS Rao, Managing Director, Intel (South Asia & Middle East) has joined Aujas’s advisory board to guide them on the telecom security domain.

“Telecom security requires expertise given the increased ubiquity & complexity of converged networks and dependence on telecom infrastructure to run business operations. Aujas brings unique security services offering for its clients in the telecom industry and I look forward to working with them, “said CS Rao.

"We're very excited to be welcoming CS Rao on our advisory board. We are confident that the experience and vision he brings to our team will be invaluable as Aujas Network continues to grow," said MS Rao, co-founder and CEO, Aujas Networks.

CS Rao also spear heads the Wimax Program initiative at Intel besides his other role as a Managing Director. His career spans successful stints with large blue chip companies like British Telecom (India), Lucent India as the Managing Director and Tellabs India as President and CEO. He was also among the core team of founders at CDOT and currently is the Chairman of the WIMAX forum, India Chapter.

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MicroWorld has recently announced its global success map worth over a multi - million dollars, becoming the first Indian Anti Virus & Content Security Solutions provider to chart an impressive footprint on the world map. Taking giant leaps in the international playground, MicroWorld is today all busy forming tie-ups with Large Format Retailers (LFRs), Government bodies & Corporate houses across the globe.

The company has signed a half a million euro deal in Germany, with one of the largest state governments, which has implemented MicroWorld's products in its network. In Mexico, MicroWorld has signed half-a-million dollar deal with Snap IN Data, one of the top 3 consulting companies in Mexico for promoting and selling their range of product through their 200+ strong reseller and channel network.

MicroWorld has recently tied up with LFRs in USA with MicroCentre, one of the leading retail outlets focusing on tech products, with more than 21 outlets, South Africa with C&A, one of the major retail chains across the country for eScan range of products and in Paraguay through its partner Computec SA. Apart from these, MicroWorld has also signed deals with Malaysia & Tunisia for various government & corporate projects.

Mr. Govind Rammurthy, CEO & Managing Director, MicroWorld, said, "At MicroWorld we are committed to provide our customers with the latest and most advanced solutions in India and abroad. Today we have partnered with customers across the globe providing them with customized solutions to meet their specific security needs. Our latest product eScan 10 has been designed keeping in mind the increasing threat to data security from malicious attacks from internal & external source. The technical expertise that forms the base of eScan 10 is sure to redefine the contours of data security industry"

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VeriSign named Mark McLaughlin as president and chief operating officer. Company founder Jim Bidzos continues to serve as executive chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer, on an interim basis.

McLaughlin, 43, previously held a number of key positions at VeriSign from 2000 to 2007, ultimately serving as executive vice president of products and marketing. In that capacity, McLaughlin played a key architectural role in developing VeriSign's strategy to focus the company on its core Internet infrastructure services, while divesting several non-core businesses. McLaughlin's earlier contributions also include having run the company's Naming Services business, where he led the successful negotiation of the current agreements for the management of the .com and .net registries, as well as a number of key strategic alliances with major partners such as eBay and Microsoft.

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PortWise has announced that it intends to get aggressive in India and take full benefits of its relationship with Saab. PortWise signed an industrial co-operation agreement with Saab around it’s platform for secure access and strong authentication, which will be offered by Saab as part of it’s Civil Security businesses, in September last year. Saab also invested in the company and now has an 18.75 % ownership in PortWise. Saab, through Saab Ventures, and PortWise CEO Mikael Jacobsson, together with the largest existing shareholders, Scope, Verdane and DFJ Esprit, will provide significant expansion capital to PortWise.

In the coming months, PortWise plans to aggressively expand its operations in India, doubling it’s team and boosting it’s network to serve Asia's third largest economy. Also on cards is a support and development centre. “India is a very important market for us and we expect double-digit growth in revenues on an annual basis for the next couple of years. PortWise has over 100 large enterprise customers in India and has further strengthened its position on key segments of the Indian market, especially within the banking and finance industry bagging accounts like Aviva, ICICI Bank, ICICI Prudential, Yes Bank, Max New York Life to name a few.” says Mikael Jacobsson, CEO of PortWise, during his regular visit to India. Talking about the global slowdown and its impact on India, Mikael Jacobsson, added “India will not be completely isolated to what is happening globally, however we believe the impact will not be as dramatic. PortWise expects India’s robust economic growth will continue despite the uncertainties facing other global markets.”

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IBM has announced its intent to acquire the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze Ltd., a privately held provider of online messaging and collaboration services, based in Hong Kong. Building on IBM Lotus' market leadership in messaging software, the asset acquisition will accelerate the delivery of affordable, Web-based e-mail services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

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Fortinet has announced that new IDC research data confirms that the company has maintained its No. 1 ranking in worldwide UTM factory revenue for Q3 2008. Based on strong sales and increased enterprise adoption of the company's new generation secure gateways, Fortinet continues to lead the UTM market ahead of Check Point, Cisco, Crossbeam, Juniper, SonicWALL and others.

Data in the latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, December 2008 confirmed: Fortinet is the overall leader in UTM factory revenue for Q3 2008, ahead of Check Point, Cisco, Crossbeam, Juniper, SonicWALL and others; Fortinet is the No. 1 vendor in the enterprise UTM ($25K-$49.9K) price band segments for both factory revenue and units shipped.

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Cyberoam announced its tie-up with Seven Seas. With this tie-up, Seven Seas a leading IT security product distributor with a strong presence in the Middle East, will be the authorized Partner of Cyberoam for Enterprise Sector in UAE. Seven Seas is a premier ISO 9001:2000 certified end-to-end ICT solutions provider. Its domain expertise is in banking, hospitality, oil & gas, real estate and medium to large family businesses delivering cross-domain ICT solutions to over 1000 customers. Cyberoam has joined hands with Seven Seas to take advantage of the latter’s vast reach and channel strength and make its unique product features available to large enterprises in the Middle East.

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Citrix Systems has announced that the Citrix Access Gateway has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for SSL VPN 2008i report. Gartner defines leaders as demonstrating “balanced progress and effort on all execution and vision categories. Their actions raise the competitive bar for all products in the market, and they can change the course of the industry.” Access the report here, compliments of Citrix.

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BigFix and Trend Micro announced recently a joint licensing agreement that will result in a comprehensive and modular Trend Micro endpoint security management solution, powered by the BigFix platform that scales to the requirements of very large enterprises with more than 10,000 endpoints.

The first in a series of endpoint modules anticipated to be available is the Trend Micro Web Protection Module, designed to proactively protect endpoints against Web threats and provide security enhancements to the BigFix platform.

The planned integration of Trend Micro’s Web Protection solution and the BigFix platform is expected to allow IT managers in very large enterprises to achieve easy deployment, management scalability and efficient control of their high-numbered endpoints through BigFix’s single-agent architecture and comprehensive, consolidated single-console views.

“The BigFix-Trend Micro agreement changes the enterprise IT security landscape. The combination of BigFix’s highly scalable and adaptable infrastructure management platform and Trend Micro’s cloud-client technologies result in fully unified endpoint security solutions that cut costs and lower security risks in ways that no other solution set can touch,” said Amrit Williams, CTO of BigFix. “Customers can quickly adopt these solutions with high confidence of success, containing IT security costs, and freeing the enterprise to dedicate resources to more strategic business initiatives.”

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CA has signed a definitive agreement to acquire New York-based Orchestria Corporation, a leading provider of data loss prevention (DLP) technology. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. CA will develop and sell Orchestria’s information-centric DLP product in the rapidly growing DLP market. It also plans to transform the way organizations think about DLP, identity management and information security overall. Organizations and auditors need to know who has access to data and what they can do with it at a role or user level. By using Orchestria’s DLP technology with CA identity and access management solutions, organizations will now be able to consolidate and strengthen their security postures by including information-centric policies in the process of centrally managing users and roles, and their access throughout the enterprise.

“With this acquisition, CA will deliver one of the broadest and most advanced information security solutions in the market today and address the demand for a new generation of identity and access management,” said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager, CA Security Management. “We are continuing our aggressive plan to deliver to our customers a comprehensive solution for identity and access management to help meet their security, compliance and privacy needs.”

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In response to the recent glitch in SonicalWall’s email security server which left countless customers exposed to spam, phishing and malware threats, Astaro, a leading vendor of security appliances (www.astaro.com), announced the start of the Sonic Switch promotion: get 50% off Astaro appliances with the trade-in of any SonicWall appliance. SonicWall's license manager allegedly reset the license keys for many installed products late on Monday night, rendering the security appliances useless.

Customers were left with no protection against myriad mail threats for several hours. While it is not clear exactly how many users were affected, many customers left angry messages on a forum on the SonicWall site. Through the Sonic Switch Promotion, SonicWall users now have the option to trade in their appliance for 50% off the list price on all Astaro hardware, software and maintenance for 3 or 5 year agreements. In addition, Astaro will extend SonicWall users' existing contract terms, ensuring that no customer will lose money on the deal.

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Check Point Software Technologies Ltd has signed an agreement to acquire Nokia's security appliance business. The two businesses have collaborated over the past decade to deliver industry-leading enterprise security solutions. Building on this collaboration, Check Point will provide an extended security appliance portfolio developed, manufactured and supported by Check Point.

"As a pioneer in security appliances, the Nokia security appliance business has been an important strategic partner for Check Point and has helped us achieve early leadership in the security appliance market," said Gil Shwed, Chairman and CEO at Check Point. "Adding Nokia's security appliance portfolio into Check Point's broad range of security solutions is the natural conclusion of our long collaboration, and will assure a smooth path forward for our mutual customers."

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Aladdin Knowledge Systems has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by an investor group led by Vector Capital, a leading private equity firm specializing in the technology industry, in a transaction valued at approximately $160 million. Under the terms of the agreement, Aladdin shareholders will receive $11.50 per share in cash for each share of common stock they hold. This represents a premium of approximately 20% over Aladdin's closing share price on January 9, 2009, the last trading day prior to today's announcement, and a premium of approximately 64% over Aladdin’s closing share price on January 5, 2009, the last trading day prior to Aladdin’s announcement that it was in continuing discussions with Vector Capital regarding a possible strategic transaction.

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HID Global has announced that it has established an agreement with INSIDE Contactless, a leading provider of advanced open-standard contactless chip technologies, to manufacture contactless prelaminates for INSIDE Contactless based upon the MicroPass intelligent payment platform..

"The expansion of our partnership directly reflects the fundamental changes that are taking place in the contactless market," said Denis Hébert, president and CEO of HID Global. "As issuers seek to provide their customers with convenient, yet more secure platforms for cashless payment cards, it was only natural that both INSIDE and HID should partner to fulfill that existing need."

By extending their partnership, INSIDE Contactless will be able to provide card manufacturers with access to the MicroPass contactless payment platform coupled with contactless antenna technology in prelaminate packages from HID Global, further enabling card issuers to deliver an exceptional cardholder experience within this emerging market.

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AVG Technologies has announced the acquisition of Sana Security, a leading developer in identity theft prevention software. Sana’s forward-looking technology in the industry comes from its behavior-based security software that proactively protects against threats in a similar way to the human immune system. The transaction marks another successful milestone as AVG continues its corporate growth strategy to continually improve Internet security coverage for individuals and small businesses and expand its global footprint. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Sana also provides AVG with its first offices in Silicon Valley.

“AVG’s acquisition of Sana is one of the most exciting accomplishments in identity theft prevention. Sana’s unique behavioral software, combined with AVG’s existing security technology, will provide the most comprehensive online identity protection in the industry, delivering continuous real-time protection. At the same time, AVG will continue to maintain low PC resource utilization for optimal system performance, a critical requirement both for the individual at home and for the business user,” said J.R. Smith, CEO of AVG Technologies.

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