Dell acquires SecureWorks to boost managed services

Dell is to acquire security-as-a-service company SecureWorks.

The acquisition will expand Dell's 'as-a-service' products and will add to its overall information security knowledge, the company said on Tuesday.

Peter Altabef, Dell Services president, has announced that the company is to acquire SecureWorks, a security services firm. Photo credit: Dell

"Dell currently provides software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions [and] today's announcement will make Dell a world leader in security and managed services," said Peter Altabef, Dell Services president, in a conference call. "Security needs to be addressed and embedded in everything we do."

SecureWorks's client base includes more than 1,500 banks and credit unions, according to Dell, and the company sees over 30,000 types of malware each day. Dell said SecureWorks expects sales of $120m (£76m) in 2010, of which about 90 percent — roughly $108m — will come from repeat service contracts. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

"In [IT] security the market is moving so quickly that we decided that to build that [capability] organically would have taken too long," Altabef said, explaining why Dell had not developed its own in-house security product. "You can see through the acquisitions we have made recently that there is a great deal of emphasis on enhancing Dell's capabilities in a host of different cloud ways."

Dell acquisitions
In December, Dell announced plans to acquire Insite One, a cloud storage service firm for the US healthcare market. In November, Dell bought Boomi, a software-as-a-service company that focuses on using technology hosted in the cloud to provide integration services between on- and off-premise applications.

"Dell has recognised it has needed to expand its services portfolio and it's been doing that over the last two or three years in a range of areas, particularly in the managed side," Tony Lock, programme director for research and analysis firm Freeform Dynamics, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "Security management has always been something that many companies have found difficult to do."

Organisations have been keen on getting security delivered as-a-service rather than as a self-managed application "because security is inherently complex and there are many areas within it, some of which SecureWorks provide", he added.