St. Bernard Buys Red Condor Assets

San Diego’s St. Bernard Software, which provides the iPrism network security appliance, said today it has acquired the e-mail security technology and substantially all other assets of Red Condor, a six-year-old startup near Sonoma State University.

St. Bernard (OTCBB: [[ticker:SBSW]]) says the acquisition of Red Condor’s spam-and-bot filtering technology enhances and expands its security offering, which combines its network security appliances with software and hosted security solutions. The San Diego company says Red Condor’s 34 employees will continue to work in Rohnert Park, CA, giving St. Bernard a presence in Northern California for the first time.

Red Condor CEO Thomas Steding, however, will not continue under St. Bernard’s banner. He has nearly two decades of experience in Internet security, including a stint as founding CEO of Pretty Good Privacy, the company formed around the controversial e-mail encryption software that Philip Zimmerman created in 1991.

St. Bernard did not disclose financial terms of the deal, although a recent filing with securities regulators indicates that Red Condor and some of its lenders got more than 2.4 million restricted common shares of St. Bernard stock, which trades on the over-the-counter bulletin board. Based on today’s close of 35 cents a share, St. Bernard’s offer would be valued at nearly $800,000. However, the transaction was complicated by a related investment in St. Bernard, and a spokeswoman for the company said CEO Lou Ryan was unavailable today to discuss terms of the deal.

St. Bernard says that combining the two companies’ technologies will allow it to offer customers, which range from small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to large business enterprises, a suite of easy-to-use, cost-effective, and scalable Internet and e-mail security solutions.

As part of the asset acquisition, St. Bernard says it also will get 1,900 new customers as well as Red Condor’s ISP and MSP partner network.

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.