Do Acquisitions Help or Hurt the Proxy?

In the Secure Web Gateway space there seems to have been quite a bit of consolidation over the last few years. Ironport got acquired by Cisco, Secure Computing was acquired by McAfee who in turn is being acquired by Intel, and Finjan was acquired by Marshal8e6, now M86 Security. SaaS offerings of Secure Web Gateway offerings have also been moving in the same direction with the acquisition of ScanSafe by Cisco and MXLogic by McAfee.

It seems all the big players want to play in the Secure Web Gateway space. Only Websense and Blue Coat remain independent players in this market focusing specifically on Web Security. The good news about an acquisition is that the offering is part of a larger company with more resources, so it's less likely the company or the product will fail. The bad news about an acquisition is the product is now part of a larger offering and often times there's less focus and less knowledge about that specific product as the employees become more generalists that have to understand a broader range of products.

A great example of this is Ironport's acquisition by Cisco. For a while Cisco let Ironport continue on as a separate entity which was the best of both worlds for Ironport's customers. A dedicated sales and support team with all the backing of a giant company. But in the last year, Cisco moved sales to their general sales team a group responsible for all of Cisco's products, and more recently the Ironport support team was swallowed whole into Cisco's support infrastructure. Can this be good for the customer that only has Ironport, and uses some other networking vendor for their gear?

While Blue Coat and Websense may not have the giant size of Cisco, at least they still have the specialization and expertise to help out their customers specific issues associated with web gateways and proxies. Personally, I'll go for the specialization over the size of the company any day.