SonicWall To Acquire Aventail
A pioneer in the SSL VPN market, Aventail has a strong foothold in the enterprise and also offers an SSL VPN managed service, said Evan Kaplan, founder and CEO at the Seattle-based vendor.
SonicWall, which already has a large share of the lower end of the SSL VPN market, expects the acquisition to build on its relevancy with the channel, said Matt Medeiros, president and CEO.
Medeiros estimates that "probably 60 percent" of Aventail channel partners are also SonicWall partners.
SonicWall, Sunnyvale, Calif., has been aggressively targeting the enterprise with products such as the Email Security 6000 and 8000, and in May released its enterprise-focused E7500 unified threat management appliance.
"We now have a complete suite of products that any enterprise customer will consider," said Medeiros.
SonicWall will "go through some rationalization" to determine how many of Aventail's staff will be brought over after the merger is finalized. "There is some level of duplication, and we will take care of that in the coming weeks," said Medeiros.
The deal is expected to close in July. SonicWall doesn't expect it to impact financial performance for Q2 2007.