Congrats to Blue Coat – PerspecSys buy is wise choice

Congratulations to enterprise security industry leader Blue Coat Systems on their acquisition of PerspecSys.

Our portfolio company PerspecSys, an early leader in the rapidly emerging cloud data protection market, was recently acquired by security gateway leader Blue Coat Systems.  This was a very savvy move by Blue Coat and it positions them well in the cloud gateway/cloud access security broker (CASB) market which is projected to grow rapidly by numerous industry analysts.

There is already a tremendous amount of data residing in cloud based applications, and it is increasing very rapidly – projected to reach 6.5 Zettabytes by 2018.  PerspecSys offers the most secure, reliable and flexible way to truly protect the sensitive portions of this data.  Ascent backed PerspecSys in 2013 because we knew security concerns were the number one impediment to formal enterprise cloud adoption, yet most companies were already using numerous cloud applications, whether officially sanctioned or not. PerspecSys offers a unique and effective way to enable secure cloud usage – just what customers were realizing they already needed.

In the two years that we worked closely with PerspecSys, the company launched a next generation platform for protecting, using tokenization or encryption, sensitive data that resides in any cloud application, attracted a strong team of proven security executives, and signed up a growing list of blue chip customers.  New bookings growth in 2014 was well north of 100% and customers were pro-actively seeking out PerspecSys.  The company generated healthy international business as their solution also enabled companies to adhere to strict data residency requirements in countries that forbid customer data from leaving that country’s borders.  In a highly competitive market, PerspecSys was earning a reputation for delivering a robust offering and being best-of-breed.

By combing forces, the story only gets stronger, as Blue Coat holds the leading position in the security gateway market, and has considerable resources to put behind future growth in the emerging CASB category.  The PerspecSys team should be proud of their accomplishments and the acquisition by Blue Coat shows clear validation of the value they were building for customers. Congratulations.