SonicWall Acquires Aventail

SSL VPN provider Aventail was acquired by SonicWall yesterday. SonicWall has been a well known force in the mid-range firewall market (predominantly for SMB and retail). Firewall vendors have been struggling to add capabilities as new entrants and approaches have increased competition in the space. Vendors such as Fortinet have come to market with appliances that have multiple security capabilities such as network appliance based anti-virus, intrusion prevention, firewall, VPN, content filtering and traffic shaping creating the so-called UTM space.

The security industry seems poised for a new round of consolidation after a period of inactivity. Watch for more announcements to come.