Radware Eyes Going Private Via Sale To Siris Capital: Report

Publicly-traded Radware has a valuation of $1.67 billion and competes with companies like Akamai, Cloudflare, and F5 to protect corporate websites from targeted denial-of-service attacks from hackers.

Radware is in talks to sell itself to private equity firm Siris Capital after being publicly traded on Nasdaq for nearly 22 years, CNBC reported.

No deal is assured for the Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity and application delivery provider and talks may still fall apart, according to CNBC, which cited people familiar with the matter. Radware has a valuation of $1.67 billion and competes with companies like Akamai, Cloudflare, and F5 to protect corporate websites from targeted denial-of-service (DoS) attacks from malicious actors, CNBC reported.

Radware’s stock climbed $1.50 (4.28 percent) to $36.52 per share in trading Monday, which is the highest the company’s stock has ever traded since going public on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in October 1999. Both Radware and Siris declined to comment to CRN on the reported sale talks.

[Related: 10 Companies Recently Acquired By A Private Equity Firm]

Radware was founded in 1997 and employed 1,122 people as of Dec. 31, 2020, up 1.2 percent from 1,094 employees a year earlier, according to regulatory filings. Approximately 44 percent of Radware’s workforce is located in Israel, 25 percent is in Asia-Pacific, 20 percent is in the Americas (primarily the United States), and the remaining 10 percent are in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, filings stated.

The company’s revenue for the 2020 calendar year dipped to $250 million, down 0.8 percent from $252.1 million in 2019. And net income for 2020 plummeted to $9.6 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, down 57.3 percent from $22.6 million, or $0.47 per diluted share, the year prior.

Siris Capital was founded in 2011 with a focus on tech and telecom private equity investing, and currently has 10 companies in its portfolio, none of whom focus on cybersecurity. Siris previously acquired virtual private network (VPN) and network access control (NAC) vendor Pulse Secure in August 2014, and then sold Pulse to automation vendor Ivanti in December 2020 for a reported $530 million.

Radware, meanwhile, said it markets and sells its products and services primarily through indirect sales channels that consist of distributors and resellers located in North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. In addition, Radware said it also generates direct sales to select customers mainly in the United States, most of whom are strategic customers.

Radware said it sells its technology primarily to independent distributors - including value added resellers (VARs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and global system integrators (GSIs) - and are highly dependent upon these distributors’ active marketing and sales efforts. The company has a global reseller relationship with Atos, and distribution relationships with Arrow and Westcon in the U.S.

The company works closely with the following application vendors to increase availability, improve end user response time and reduce overall cost of deployment: Blackboard; Cisco; Citrix; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle; SAP; and VMware. Radware also has 35 technology alliance partners focused on creating integrated offerings, including: Amazon, Check Point, HPE, Nutanix, Red Hat, RSA, and Thales.

For enterprises, Radware offers data center protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, application protection through web application firewalls, as well as application delivery. The company also offers public cloud protection, cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), and cloud threat detection and response (CTDR).

As a publicly traded company, five institutional investors each own between 5 percent and 10 percent of Radware’s outstanding shares, according to regulatory filings: Cadian Capital Management (9.62 percent); Senvest Management (7.07 percent); Artisan Partners (6.78 percent); Morgan Stanley (5.85 percent); and Legal & General Investment Management (5.19 percent).

Among individual shareholders, the Zisapel family controls a substantial portion of the outstanding shares, with: Chairman Yehuda Zisapel, 79, owning 3.61 percent of outstanding shares; his wife Nava Zisapel owning 6.45 percent of outstanding shares; and Radware President, CEO and Director (and their son) Roy Zisapel, 50, owning 3.03 percent of outstanding shares.