Intel Acquires McAfee for $7.68 Billion

[FiXT]

Chip giant Intel has agreed to purchase anti-virus and security developer McAfee Inc. for $48 /share, roughly $7.68 billion dollar in cash, a sizable improvement over its previous trading price of just around $30/share. The deal is still pending shareholder approval and regulatory clearances, but both companies board of directors have approved the ... [ Read full article ]

[_dangtx_]

interesting move. they want to bundle mcafee with their chips ? would be a 'free gift' for the consumer..perhaps

[FiXT]

Originally Posted by _dangtx_

interesting move. they want to bundle mcafee with their chips ? would be a 'free gift' for the consumer..perhaps

I don't quite think their purpose of dropping $7.68 billion on a company was just to provide free copies of anti-virus to people

Much larger things at play here. Intel has pushed security and protection on the hardware level for a long time; things like Execute Disable Bit, TXT, their anti-theft features etc.

Acquiring McAfee may just allow them to integrate a very well established and robust software feature and control into hardware side of things for the complete package.

On the consumer level, I wouldn't forsee it making a huge impact, but for enterprise and business, it could be revolutionary imo.

[Arinoth]

Oh please let this be a solution to using crappy hardware encryption software i'm forced to support right now. I HATE SecureDoc, its such a pain and look forward to seeing this potentially implement on motherboards/sata controllers to make laptops more secure.

[Rison]

“Threat Detected, System infected with AMD CPU. Quarantine immediately.”

lol, I was thinking the exact same thing when I read that article.

[_dangtx_]

true, but john doe might be swinger over to the '50$ more expensive inhell build that wow! includes 200$ worth of antivirus!!' :)

[MpG]

Kind of interesting in that it represents Intel burning a huge chunk of cash on something that doesn't (immediately, anyway) figure into the hardware wars that we tend to focus on. Or, taken more pessimistically, it could also be inferred that Intel doesn't see the need to reinvest all it's money back into it's core business.

[HalifaxPete]

Intel will have to bring back the credibility of the McAfee brand before it can integrate McAfee's code on any chip or system.

[Perineum]

Might only want McAfee for rights to a patent they hold for something that Intel developed then realized they needed access to the patent. Buying the whole company was an afterthought?

Regardless, they paid 7.87 billion too much

[DCCV44.2223]

While Intel sold their old AV product to Symantec years ago, they have invested (through Intel Capital) in AVG in recent years, so their interest in security software is not entirely new.

Many seem to think this is a play for the hand held market, comparatively there's not a lot of growth in PC/Servers and AV for those platforms is a cash cow -- it'll be mad for them to kill that revenue stream by embedding AV in PC/Server processors. OTOH, smart phones and tablets processors are all ARM based and Intel would dearly like to break into that segment with the next Atom platform. Surely it'll help if they can offer an unique feature such as built in AV.

As for any embedded AV, I think it'll need to be more "cloud" and behaviour based than the traditional AV most people are using in their PC (which still relies heavily on a local blacklist). Both McAfee and Symantec have embraced "cloud based" AV in a big way, but buying Symantec would pretty much wipe out Intel's cash reserve and there are probably bits of Symantec that Intel don't really want.

Most people think they overpaid (McAfee has something like 800 mil in cash so the deal is ~6.8 billion) but that's the cost of trying to break into a new market, call it a 2-3 billion dollar bet.