SonicWall on Wednesday said it plans to buy e-mail security company MailFrontier for $31 million in cash.
The deal is expected to close in about 10 days, pending regulatory approval, said John DiLullo, vice president of sales at SonicWall, Sunnyvale, Calif.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based MailFrontier makes antispam, antiphishing and messaging security software and appliances. Plans call for SonicWall to eventually incorporate MailFrontier technology in its line of firewall, Web filtering, remote access and data protection products and services, DiLullo said.
In the short term, however, SonicWall aims to keep each vendor’s products separate. Douglas Brockett, vice president and general manager at SonicWall, said secure messaging and firewall products are essentially separate devices in a network and will remain so for some time. So for now, SonicWall will work to sharpen the compatibility between its products and MailFrontier’s offerings, which is expected to take about six months, he said.
A fully integrated security solution that blends functionality from both vendors would be a much longer-term project, Brockett said. The MailFrontier product suite will be immediately available to SonicWall channel partners.