McAfee announced it has acquired Carlsbad, Calif., start-up Preventsys, which makes risk-management and compliance reporting software, for just under $10 million.
The Preventsys Security Risk Management System consolidates data from multi-vendor vulnerability, configuration and threat-assessment tools to give an enterprise a dashboard view and a summary of security compliance. McAfee said it has plans for integrating Preventsys into the McAfee management console, ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), which manages anti-virus software, anti-spyware software and other McAfee security products.
“The underlying driver for acquiring Preventsys is its ability to pull compliance information from various sources,” said George Kurtz, McAfee senior vice president of risk management. In the future, McAfee intends to integrate the Preventsys compliance tool with ePO. “EPO is our management framework, and we want to be able to pull the state information Preventsys provides and bring that into ePO.”
McAfee’s vulnerability-assessment scanner Foundstone Enterprise is already one of several security tools supported by the Preventsys compliance-reporting product, which last year was favorably reviewed in a Network World Clear Choice test.
The Preventsys product has undergone name changes since it was first launched as Preventsys 1.0 in 2003, and McAfee will be going through its own process of selecting a name for it now that it’s a McAfee product.
Preventsys, co-founded by John Williams and Brian Costello with venture-capital backing from Enterprise Partners Venture Capital and Utah Venture, among others, now has about two dozen employees and most are expected to join McAfee at its Mission Viejo location in Southern California.