After the two parties announced their merger in October, Secureworks is now officially part of Sophos. With that, the former has been delisted.
Previously, Dell was the largest shareholder of U.S.-based Secureworks. Before that, between 2011 and 2016, the company was wholly privately owned by Dell Technologies. However, in October 2024, Sophos put down $859 million for Secureworks to take the company private once more.
Integration with Sophos
The main component of Secureworks is the TDIR platform Taegis. This threat-detection platform targets both SMBs and larger enterprises. During the October announcement, Sophos CEO Joe Levy stated that Taegis would complement Sophos’ offerings. This should benefit customers “of all sizes,” Levy said.
Secureworks still had a market value of $800 million in the summer of 2024. In 2019, Dell was already considering selling Secureworks. With this, Dell wanted to reduce its amount of debt, about $50 billion at the time.
Tip: Acquisition of Secureworks by Sophos further consolidates security market
Security platform
Like other security companies, Sophos is focusing on increasingly broad offerings. Perhaps there were too many players in this market; the counter topped 3,000 by some estimates last year. That number will have dropped considerably. Not only are parties announcing acquisitions occasionally, some will have lost funding now that the high tide of capital investments has gone away since the end of 2022. Many vendors have completed multiple acquisitions in fairly short order within this space, with Wiz being a well-known example. For a while, it looked like Wiz itself would be acquired by Google parent company Alphabet, but that prospective mega deal was rejected by the security company.
Sophos itself has been part of private equity Thoma Bravo since 2019. That company isn’t sitting still and is looking to offer a part of SailPoint for trading with a market value of $11.5 billion. Thoma Bravo additionally acquired security firm Darktrace last year, which, like Sophos, is a British firm.
Also read: Why Thoma Bravo almost always places the right bets on tech