Cisco acquires Sourcefire for $2.7 bn

With the close of this acquisition, Cisco will provide one of the industry's most comprehensive advanced threat protection portfolios, as well as a broad set of enforcement and remediation options that are integrated, pervasive, continuous and open.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco is paying $76 per share in cash in exchange for each share of Sourcefire and assuming outstanding equity awards for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.7 billion, including retention-based incentives.

With the completion of the transaction, Sourcefire employees join the Cisco Security Group led by Young. Additionally, Martin Roesch, founder and chief technology officer of Sourcefire, becomes vice president and chief architect for Cisco's Security Group reporting directly to Young.

On July 23, 2013, Cisco had announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with cybersecurity solutions firm.

"To truly protect against all possible attack vectors, our focus is to examine the nature of modern networked environments and devices and to defend them by deeply understanding and analyzing the mindset of the attackers," said Christopher Young, senior vice president, Cisco Security Group.

Cisco and Sourcefire customers will benefit from Cisco's commitment to drive forward both the ASA and FirePOWER platforms. Cisco is also committed to open source innovation and will continue to support Snort, ClamAV and other open source projects.