London, UK: Proofpoint, Inc. has acquired Socialware, a leading provider of social media compliance solutions, for approximately $9.0 million in cash. Proofpoint’s social media security solutions currently work together with Socialware’s offerings in customer environments. In the first quarter of 2016, Proofpoint expects to further integrate Socialware’s compliance workflow and unique content capture/review capabilities with Proofpoint Social Media Security and Compliance to create the broadest and deepest social media security and compliance solution available in the market.
Organizations worldwide are faced with a myriad of security and compliance challenges when attempting to go social. Bad actors are constantly attempting to steal customer data. For regulated industries an alphabet soup of regulators and regulations, such as the FFIEC, FINRA, FTC, FCA, IIROC and SEC, make compliance more challenging every day. As an early pioneer in social media compliance for the financial services industry, Socialware helped organizations capture and enforce compliant social media use and activity for regulated employees.
“We continue to see a growing opportunity to solve the compliance and security challenges facing companies looking to use social media,” said Gary Steele, Proofpoint CEO. “With the Socialware team working as part of our dedicated Social Media Security and Compliance group, Proofpoint has enhanced its compliance and security expertise, experience and opportunity to innovate. In turn, we expect to deliver an even stronger set of capabilities to our valued customers as well as our technology partners across the social marketing, selling and listening ecosystem.”
The combined Proofpoint/Socialware offering is already in production in customer environments today. In the first quarter of 2016, Proofpoint anticipates new integration and functionality will be available; in particular, the ability to use more callable compliance for automated social content and communication scanning. The new functionality will feature the combination of Proofpoint’s sophisticated policies and detection with Socialware’s advanced workflow capabilities. Proofpoint believes this will represent the most robust social media compliance solution available in the market. In addition, expanded support for callable compliance integrations and APIs is expected to be available on the same timeline for existing and new Proofpoint partners such as Hootsuite, LinkedIn, Percolate and Salesforce.
Socialware customers will not only benefit from Proofpoint’s ability to detect unauthorized social account and channel usage and to enforce workflow and policies from any location or device but also its fully-integrated, industry-leading archiving capabilities. Organizations with the combined offering can simultaneously protect social users and their social accounts from compromise, reducing their security liability dramatically.
Proofpoint currently expects the transaction to have no material impact on revenue, billings, and non-GAAP profitability for the fourth quarter of 2015 and full year 2016 as guided in its earnings release on October 21, 2015.