Dell Technologies has announced that the negotiations with Symphony Technology Group (STG) have ended and that they will be selling RSA Security Business to the private equity firm. The sale of the legacy security firm is reportedly held at a value of $2.075 billion.
Symphony Technology is part of an investor group that will be acquiring RSA from Dell. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and AlpInvest Partners are part of the investor group and are also involved in the sale. The sale will include RSA Archer, RSA NetWitness Platform, RSA SecurID, RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence, and RSA Conference.
The technology firm acquired RSA when Dell bought EMC in 2015 for the price of $67 billion. EMC bought RSA back in 2006 at the same price that it was sold today for: $2.1 billion.
According to Dell COO and vice chairman Jeff Clarke, the company sold RSA as part of their company-wide security strategy. RSA was no longer aligned with the approach they were planning on taking. The sale of RSA will also simplify Dell’s business and product portfolios.
Dell’s strategy regarding security is to push for a more modernized take, employing automated and intelligent security measures on platforms, devices and infrastructures to help protect data. RSA, on the other hand, provides the risk, security, and fraud teams of companies with the ability to manage digital security risks on a holistic level. RSA looks at managing areas such as threat detection and response, access and identity management, and risk management, which they all integrate into their products.
With data becoming such a commodity in today’s digital age, companies are looking for ways to improve their security against data breaches and fraud. Trade shows are often a common place for data to become compromised, which is why event lead capture products and services have also been automated and made more secure.
As a result, investment in data and data security firms have increased in recent years. Google, for example, has even acquired Santa Cruz, California based data platform provider Looker as part of their bid to strengthen their data analytics capabilities.
RSA president Rohit Ghai mentions STG’s acquisition of their company as the next chapter of RSA’s long history. Ghai emphasized their focus on their customers and reassured those concerned that the company would be able to weather this latest change.
RSA, STG, and Dell will be coordinating with each other to ensure a smooth transition following a change of ownership due to the sale. The acquisition however, is still subject to all kinds of regulation and approval before the deal between Dell and STG concerning RSA is finalized and the turnover happens.
Symphony Technology’s acquisition of RSA comes on the heels of the private equity firm’s acquisition of Red Seal, which is a company that specializes in providing cyber risk modeling to other companies. At the moment, STG’s plans for RSA are still unclear, but given that the Palo Alto, California-based private equity firm has a record of investing or acquiring software, data, and analytics businesses, they may be looking to use RSA to supplement their product and business portfolios.