Making Sense of Websense’s Acquisitions Strategy

When Websense (NASDAQ: [[ticker:WBSN]]) announced a couple of weeks ago it had acquired Defensio, a Canadian spam filtering Web service, I realized the San Diego software developer had morphed into something bigger and more robust than I remembered.

“A lot has changed in the last three or four years,” David Meizlik, a Websense product marketing manager, told me yesterday when I stopped by to catch up on the company. Meizlik attributes part of the change to the arrival of former McAfee president Gene Hodges, who was named CEO three years ago. Shifting customer requirements also prompted changes, Meizlik explained, as their info security needs expanded from defending a network like a fortress, with firewalls and intruder alarms, to an approach focused more specifically on content—on the potential threats on web sites and in e-mail traffic.

When it was founded in 1994, Websense specialized in providing software that companies used to block their employees from using their desktop computer to view Internet porn, visit online gambling dens, and idly surf the Web. When Websense went public in 2000, its filtering software was generating $8.6 million in sales a year.

The change in direction became more apparent after Hodges was hired in January 2006 to succeed John Carrington, who had served as Websense CEO for seven years. At McAfee, Hodges had overseen technology development and strategy, as well as sales and marketing, for McAfee’s worldwide business. By then, Websense was already expanding the scope of its content filtering capabilities to identify and block computer viruses and malicious software code, but since

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.