“The decision to divest the consumer business comes down to one word – focus,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “Moving forward as a company solely focused on providing cutting-edge cloud security solutions to the corporate market will allow iSheriff to innovate and execute at an even faster rate, and to put increased investment behind new product and market development.”
As far as the consumer line goes, Untangle is merging with that part of the Total Defense business and will add it and the brand to its portfolio for securing and managing endpoint devices in the consumer and SOHO markets, with a suite of products including internet security, anti-virus, mobile security, PC tune-up and online backup.
“Over the last few years, the Total Defense brand has become synonymous with comprehensive protection of the digital assets that we’ve all come to rely upon, in both corporate and consumer settings,” said Paul Lipman, CEO at the renamed iSheriff, in a statement. “This transaction is a win-win for both our consumer and corporate partners and customers. Corporate customers and partners will benefit from the increased investment levels that iSheriff will be putting behind product and channel development, and from other key changes that we will be shortly announcing to accelerate growth and further enhance customer experience.”
Untangle said that it will invest heavily in research and development for the Total Defense portfolio.
“Total Defense and Untangle both see an opportunity in the future of the consumer market as the home becomes a more complicated and diverse network of Internet-enabled devices,” said Larry Guerin, general manager of Total Defense. “Both gateway and endpoint software solutions will be required to address the security needs of this new environment. Combined, the companies will be able to leverage each others’ technologies to develop innovative solutions that protect these new smart homes, bringing enterprise-grade solutions to the modern digital family.”