June 16, 2016 
Cybersecurity firm Blue Coat Systems has decided to opt-out of an initial public offering and sell itself to software security leader Symantec for $4.65 billion.
What has not been widely reported in the press is that Blue Coat, a relatively small cybersecurity company with a loss of $289 million in 2015, is a leading filer of United States Patent and Trademark Office Inter Partes Reviews (IPRs) that are designed to invalidate patents that are being asserted by Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) and others.
According to patent research firm Patexia, Blue Coat is a top-ten IPR filer for 2016, along with Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and GE. The firm filed ten IPRs, a higher numbers than H-P for the period.
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“Blue Coat has been at war with Finjan,” Gaston Kroub of Markman Advisors, LLC told IP CloseUp. “Like Blue Coat, Symantec has been fighting with Finjan too, so these IPR’s may be of value to Symantec as well.”
Finjan (FNJN) is among the leading targets for IPRs. It could be that Symantec finds Blue Coat attractive not only for its cybersecurity products, but also for its adversarial position with regard to Finjan and others which could assert their patents against it or Blue Coat.
In a 2015 verdict in Finjan Inc. v Blue Coat Systems, a jury awarded Finjan more than $39.5 million in damages, reports IP Watchdog. The lawsuit alleged that claims from a series of Finjan patents were infringed by several Blue Coat products, including Malware Analysis Appliance (MAA), Content Analysis System (CAS), and WebPulse.
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To help finance the transaction, Blue Coat’s existing majority investor, Bain Capital, will invest an additional $750 million in the deal. The private equity firm Silver Lake, which invested $500 million in Symantec in February, will invest an additional $500 million.
Bain had acquired the company for $2.4B in 2015.
According to The New York Times, “The deal will create a big provider of security products, both the traditional antivirus kind that has long been Symantec’s focus and the newer online protection services in which Blue Coat has specialized. Executives see little overlap between the two businesses.”
“With this transaction, we will have the scale, portfolio and resources necessary to usher in a new era of innovation designed to help protect large customers and individual consumers against insider threats and sophisticated cybercriminals,” Dan Schulman, Symantec’s chairman stated.
In its I.P.O. prospectus, Blue Coat said that it lost $289 million on top of the $598 million in sales for the 12-month-period that ended on April 30. That compares to a $271 million loss on top of nearly $569 million in sales for the same period a year before.
Image source: twitter.com/symantec; patexia.com
