Former CA Security Business Emerges As Standalone Company

CA technologies sold off its Internet security business unit to the venture capital firm Updata Partners, which formed a new company called Total Defense that officially opens its doors Monday. Total Defense will focus on selling malware protection and intrusion prevention technology to both the consumer and business markets.

Total Defense begins with a base of 4 million consumer and 60,000 business customers and a network of 5,000 partners from when it was a unit of CA."It was a business of some heft and some scale and an interesting platform from which to build," says Paul Lipman, CEO. However, CA spun the security unit off because it wasn’t a "strategic fit" with CA’s main business of enterprise technology and, more recently, virtualization and cloud computing.

However, Updata clarified in a May 14 release announcing the purchase from CA that the deal does not affect CA’s larger enterprise security business, which is focused primarily on identity and access management software. The terms of the deal between CA and Updata were not disclosed.

Total Defense will concentrate on three main areas, Lipman says. First will be software to block malware from infecting computers or networks. Malware is disguised as legitimate software that infects computers through email or a Web browser, and can steal sensitive files or personal information like credit card numbers. The second area of focus is host intrusion prevention systems, which monitor network traffic to detect and block malicious activity. The third area is to improve the customer experience."How do we make it as easy and simple as possible for our customers to deploy the technology, to use the technology and to get value out of the technology?" he says.

The company’s revenue is about evenly split from both the business and consumer markets, and each is beginning to adopt some of the traits of the other, Lipman explains. Businesses have been forced to accommodate employees bringing their personal devices into the workplace, such as tablet computers and smartphones. At the same time, households may have a dozen Web-connected devices, such as multiple PCs, laptops, phones and gaming systems--as many devices as a small business, he says.

In the consumer space, Total Defense will be going up against competitors such as Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky, Trend Micro and Webroot. In the enterprise, it will be going up against some of those companies as well as enterprise-focused firms such as Sophos and Check Point.

Currently, Total Defense’s products are on-premise software. Lipman was guarded about what the company's cloud strategy might be. "We’ll be making some announcements about the cloud in the near future," he says.

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