Fortinet Acquires AccelOps for $28M to Expand Security Fabric Strategy

By The VAR Guy

Fortinet has acquired AccelOps for $28 million in cash, effective immediately, according to an announcement made on Tuesday. The deal is expected to help Fortinet increase its ability to monitor and secure multi-vendor solutions via the company’s new Security Fabric strategy.

“The lack of a holistic view across organizations’ entire distributed, multi-vendor networks and the growing quantity and complexity of threat information create big-data security challenges,” said Ken Xie, founder, chairman and CEO of Fortinet, in a statement. “With the acquisition of AccelOps, Fortinet extends its Security Fabric to address these challenges by combining security and compliance monitoring with advanced analytics for multi-vendor security solutions, enabling automated and actionable security intelligence from IoT to the cloud.”

All of AccelOp’s solutions, which now fall under the FortiSIEM moniker, will be incorporated into the Fortinet Security Fabric, according to the announcement. Fortinet also plans to incorporate its FortiGuard Labs global threat intelligence and third-party feeds with AccelOps’ next gen security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities.

Additionally, AccelOps’ Security Operations Center and Network Operations Center capabilities will be utilized for Fortinet’s managed security service providers as well as the Fortinet Support Services. Fortinet also announced FortiCare 360 Support, a new subscription service that includes automated security and performance audits of customer infrastructure.

Fortinet could pay up to an additional $4 million in cash for AccelOps subject to the company’s future performance, according to Fortinet's SEC filings.

“Our mission has always been to help our customers make security and compliance management as effortless and effective as possible,” said Partha Bhattacharya, founder and chief technology officer, AccelOps. “The synergies between AccelOps’s solutions and Fortinet’s Security Fabric vision and thought leadership will ensure that our customers are protected with the most scalable and proven global threat intelligence, security and performance analytics and compliance and control across all types of network environments with multiple security and networking vendor products.”

In other big acquisition news, SolarWinds purchased LOGICnow last week, giving the company access to more than 20,000 MSP partners worldwide. SolarWinds CEO Kevin B. Thompson said the acquisition will allow SolarWinds to offer the most complete range of IT solutions in the managed services provider (MSP) space.

This first ran at http://thevarguy.com/information-technology-merger-and-acquistion-news/fortinet-acquires-accelops-expand-security-fabric-