Looking to expand its range of data protection products, McAfee said Thursday that it will acquire Reconnex, a maker of data protection appliances and software. (View our slideshow of 2008's hottest tech merger and acquisition deals.)

McAfee expects to close the $46 million cash acquisition by the end of September and will roll the products into its data protection business unit, where they will be sold under the McAfee Adaptive Protection brand name.

The company expects to rename the Reconnex iGuard Appliance and inSight Console products sometime around years-end.

Founded in 2003, Reconnex sells data loss prevention (DLP) software, designed to prevent sensitive documents and data from leaving corporate networks. The company's software indexes and classifies information and then stops it from leaking out of the corporate firewall.

Enterprise customers are only just beginning to purchase these products, but security vendors such as McAfee have high hopes that this market will grow into a multibillion-dollar market in the next few years.

The company has a staff of 85 and counts Qualcomm, Medstar Health Systems and Webex among its clients.

Reconnex is McAfee's second DLP acquisition. In 2006 it bought Onigma, an early maker of this type of software. Late last year, McAfee also picked up encryption vendor SafeBoot, and it has used the SafeBoot and Onigma products as the building blocks for its data protection product line.

McAfee says it will integrate the Reconnex products with its ePolicy Orchestrator management software by next year.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.