Cisco Pays $65 Million For Security Monitoring Specialist Protego

LONDON — Cisco Systems is continuing its spending spree with the purchase, for $65 million in cash, of closely-held Protego Networks Inc (Sunnyvale, California), a specialist in security monitoring and threat management devices for use in enterprise and small-to-medium size business networks.

Cisco said the ability of Protego's products to detect, correlate and mitigate threats in the network extends its continuing Self-Defending Network initiative.

Protego is already a member of Cisco's AVVID partner program and the companies have been working together on developing and selling security products.

The Protego team will be integrated into Cisco's Security Technology Group. The company was founded in 2002 and has 38 employees.

The acquisition is subject to the usual closing conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2005, which ends on January 29, 2005.Protego's scalable architecture for threat management, monitoring and mitigation are said to make more effective use of network and security devices by combining traditional security event monitoring with network intelligence, context correlation, vector analysis, anomaly detection, hotspot identification and automated mitigation capabilities.