Blue Coat Systems is being sold by one private equity firm to another for $2.4 billion as it is prepped to go public again after it was taken off the stock market in 2012.The company, with a security portfolio including hardware, software and services, is being sold by Thoma Bravo LLC to funds advised by Bain Capital.
The purpose of the sale is to further grow Blue Coat’s line of products and services, “and help us prepare to return to the public markets,” said CEO Greg Clark.
The sale price is a $1.1 billion premium on the $1.3 billion Thoma Bravo paid for it in 2012 and is expected to close by mid-year, the companies said in a press release.
A managing director of Bain, David Humphrey, says it hopes to grow the company both from within and through further acquisitions. The company started life back in 1996 as CacheFlow and specialized in WAN optimisation. Over the years it has bought other firms for SSL VPN, URL filtering, anti-virus, caching, bandwidth-management, virtualisation, parental control, and threat analysis technologies.
The company had been rumoured to be for sale for some time, with Raytheon reportedly showing interest but without making an offer.
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