3Com agreed to acquire held TippingPoint Technologies (Nasdaq: TPTI) for $47 cash per outstanding share of TippingPoint stock, representing a 13% premium over the closing price on 10-Dec-2004. The total purchase price will be approximately $430 million including acquisition costs and assumed options.
TippingPoint supplies a network-based Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) that delivers in-depth application protection, infrastructure protection and performance protection for corporate enterprises, government agencies, service providers and academic institutions. TippingPoint’s in-line system can be used to protect all IP-based voice and data traffic.
3Com said the acquisition strengthens its enterprise-focused products and uniquely complements its VoIP portfolio.
- TippingPoint is headed by Kip McClanahan, who previously was President of Motive. Prior to Motive, he was Founder, President and CEO of BroadJump, Inc., a privately held broadband software company based in Austin, Texas. Prior to founding BroadJump, Mr. McClanahan was a part of management at NetSpeed, a DSL broadband equipment company which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1998.
- TippingPoint’s Threat Suppression Engine (TSE) leverages network processors and its own set of custom ASICs. The TSE is a line-speed, hardware engine that contains all the functions needed for Intrusion Prevention, including IP defragmentation, TCP flow reassembly, statistical analysis, traffic shaping, flow blocking, flow state tracking and application-layer parsing of over 170 network protocols. The TSE reconstructs and inspects flow payloads by parsing the traffic at the application layer. As each new packet belonging to a flow arrives, the flow is re-evaluated for malicious content. The instant a flow is deemed malicious, the current packet and all subsequent packets pertaining to the flow are blocked.
- TippingPoint is based in Austin, Texas