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Blackberry Announces Acquisition of Cylance for $1.4 Billion

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Blackberry Announces Acquisition of Cylance for $1.4 Billion

One big news story dominated endpoint protection platform market headlines over the weekend: BlackBerry announced its acquisition of prominent endpoint security firm Cylance.

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In a press release, BlackBerry announced their plans to spend $1.4 billion, in addition to undisclosed employee incentives, to acquire Cyalnce. Both companies plan to close the deal at the end of BlackBerry’s fiscal year in Q1 of 2019, after fulfilling their regulatory closing conditions and obligations. This is the largest acquisition in BlackBerry’s history.

With the acquisition of Cylance, BlackBerry takes another step in repositioning itself as a cybersecurity provider. Their company now focuses on offering secure messaging, device security, and device management enterprise platforms with a special emphasis on enterprise-level IoT security.

The company has accordingly recently moved away from their traditional mobile device design and manufacturing—the iconic keyboard-embedded smartphones which brought them to pominence—altogether after suffering from a slipping market share.   

John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, said in a statement: “Cylance’s leadership in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity will immediately complement our entire portfolio, UEM and QNX in particular. We are very excited to onboard their team and leverage our newly combined expertise.”

“We believe adding Cylance’s capabilities to our trusted advantages in privacy, secure mobility, and embedded systems will make BlackBerry Spark indispensable to realizing the Enterprise of Things.”

Cylance showed remarkable success in 2018. Raised $120 million in a series E funding round, was one of twelve cybersecurity vendors named to the Forbes Cloud 100 List, and was one of sixty-six cybersecurity firms named to the 2018 Inc. 5000 list.  It specialized in AI and machine learning protection and threat detection.  

According to reports from the companies, Cylance will continue to function as a separate business unit under the BlackBerry umbrella. You can read more about the acquisition of endpoint security solution provider Cylance here.   

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