Deal: McAfee buys SiteAdvisor

McAfee announced this AM that they are acquiring SiteAdvisor, which just last month unveiled their service to test and evaluate the relative "security" of most of the websites out there. I actually tried the software and it broke my Yahoo! mail, so I couldn't really check it out.

This is a very aggressive move for McAfee, since SiteAdvisor had not entered the revenue generation phase. But SiteAdvisor was positioned well in the marketplace and by selling out now, they remove the risk of having to raise more money and actually meet revenue expectations. This is a textbook start-up folks.

I suspect the key asset here is the database of web sites. That will be very hard to replicate in any reasonable timeframe for anyone else. Since this is a consumer offering, expect SiteAdvisor to be bundled into McAfee's security suite sooner rather than later. It's stuff like this that will help McAfee to stand out in the commodity desktop security suite business, especially in the face of the coming price war driven by the entrance of Microsoft.

I'm blogging during a break in my day-long meeting, so I don't have time to do a lot of digging on this one, but it's a strong and good move by McAfee.

Here is the release: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060405/sfw108.html?.v=37