acquired by Calix, and a founding shareholder of NextNet, a Wi-Max equipment provider acquired by Clearwire Communications.
St. Bernard now has a four-member board, with one board observer, Ryan said.
As I’ve reported previously, Ryan is a software industry veteran and former venture partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Sand Hill Capital who stepped in as CEO at St. Bernard about 17 months ago. So the Red Condor deal represents the opening gambit in his new strategy for the San Diego network security specialist.
St. Bernard’s core technology is iPrism, a network appliance installed on customer networks to help them manage their Internet access and filter Web content as part of a hosted solution.
Red Condor has developed a similar appliance and hosted solution approach, and Ryan says St. Bernard is now looking to build on the technology platform that Red Condor created. In addition to providing e-mail content filtering, archiving, and indexing capabilities, Red Condor’s team is looking to add new features, such as data leakage protection.
It also stands to reason that St. Bernard would combine its appliance and Red Condor’s into a single network device, but Ryan didn’t want to go there. “With respect to how this all converges with iPrism, there are a lot of things we’re looking at,” he says ambivalently.
As part of the acquisition, St. Bernard extended job offers to 34 of Red Condor’s 40 employees. A St. Bernard spokeswoman says more than half of those (19) are engineering staffers, including co-founders Jeffrey Aguilera, Dave Brounstein, and Brien Voorhees.
“The platform they’ve developed is very scalable and robust,” Ryan says. “The beauty of this is that we have a platform now that gives us lots of flexibility.”
