On April 21, BlackBerry announced
plans to acquire Watchdox, a maker of enterprise content security and digital
rights management (DRM) solutions, aimed at large businesses and customers in
highly regulated industries. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but reports estimate the deal to be between $100M-$150M -- about a 10x multiple on WatchDox' revenues, which are estimated between $10-15M.
The deal puts BlackBerry squarely
in the fast-growing mobile content and device security market — which is
surging, as corporate data breaches continue to make headlines, and the names
Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning remain front-of-mind for IT security
professionals.
For the segments of the Mobile
Device Security Markets WatchDox addresses, Strategy Analytics forecasts total
revenue to grow at 19% over the next 4 years (from $1.8B in 2014 to $3.8B in
2018). Our survey shows that lost or stolen mobile devices containing corporate
data is a concern for nearly two-thirds (65%) of enterprises. Yet, less than
one-third (31%) of organizations support data encryption capabilities on personally-liable
devices (which are the majority of smartphones and tablets used in
enterprises).
WatchDox provides three
core product offerings around enterprise content security. It has enterprise
file sync and share solution, similar to others on the market from box,
Symantec, Citrix and others, however with an enhanced DRM capability allowing
for very fine grained access controls and policies to be applied to individual
pieces of content on the platform.
The other major product
from WatchDox, and probably its best-known technology, is a secure document gateway
and access management platform. This solution is one of the few successful
examples of DRM products in enterprise. While past content management and DLP
solutions have not lived up to the promise, what stocks was able to establish
itself as a core technology for securing sensitive documents such as financial
content, board room and executive level documents and content, and other
sensitive corporate information. (It's used in 150 of the Fortune 1000). Most importantly,
the solution allows for control of documents regardless of the device type or location
of the end-user, making it a flexible security tool for businesses with a mix
of corporate- and personal-liable mobile devices.
The WatchDox solution was
also very open to integration. For instance, it can enforce policies associated
with content identified by third-party DLP systems (such as Symantec and
McAfee), and also work with security information and event management platforms
to audit and track document usage and potential violation incidents.
Core capabilities of the
platform include the ability to prevent printing, forwarding through e-mail,
watermarking of content, and automated expiration/deletion of content. The
system can also dictate what platforms sensitive information can be moved to,
such as approved endpoint devices, and cloud platforms to SharePoint or public
cloud storage solutions.
BlackBerry plans to offer
WatchDox capabilities as an add-on service to BES 12. The addition of WatchDox
brings two critical pieces to blackberries EMM portfolio: a competitive
enterprise file sync and share platform, putting it on par with EMM competitors
who may have won deals vs. BlackBerry in the past based this feature; and a differentiating
enterprise DRM platform, which will help BlackBerry separate from competitors
who either have to partner for this capability, or have inferior level of
capabilities built into their platforms.