Sophos CEO: Faster Growth Expected Under Thoma Bravo Ownership

Sophos’ MSP business grew more than 75% year over year last quarter.

Thoma Bravo‘s nearly $4 billion acquisition of cybersecurity giant Sophos is now complete and the company is ready to gain even more ground on rivals such as McAfee and CrowdStrike in endpoint, and Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet in next-gen firewall.

Thoma Bravo, the private equity firm, has acquired more than 200 software and technology companies representing more than $50 billion of value. Among the firm’s acquisitions are Imperva, Veracode and Barracuda Networks, and a stake in McAfee.

Most recently, Sophos introduced a new Xstream architecture for its XG Firewall with transport layer security (TLS) traffic decryption capabilities designed to eliminate security risk associated with encrypted network traffic.

XG Firewall now also features AI-enhanced threat analysis from SophosLabs and accelerated application performance.

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Kris Hagerman, Sophos’ CEO, talks about what the acquisition will mean for his company and what partners can expect in the coming months.

Channel Futures: With the acquisition completed, what’s next in the process?

Kris Hagerman: Well, we continue to grow and succeed as a company. We’re now going to be no longer listed on the London Stock Exchange as a publicly traded company and will become a private company with
Thoma Bravo as our sole investor. And we’re just very excited to start this next chapter. We’ve had a really good run over the last few years. We feel like we’re on a real roll right now and we think working with Thoma Bravo will only help accelerate that.

CF: What will this acquisition mean for Sophos’ partners? Will it create new opportunities for them?

Sophos’ Kris Hagerman

KH: Yes, and I mean that fundamentally. Let’s start with the basics. Sophos is committed to our channel first and channel is our best go-to-market strategy. This strategy is a big part of what has driven our success and that will continue. And Thoma Bravo sees an exciting opportunity to continue to aggressively grow Sophos, both organically and inorganically, and so do we. And with Thoma Bravo’s guidance and support and investment, we believe we can accelerate the next-gen transition we already have well underway and get to the future faster, which has benefits for our customers, our partners and for Sophos as a whole.

If you think about where we are at the moment, we’ve been driving this quite exciting transition to become a true next-gen security leader, and as of the last quarter, we now have over 60% of our business in this next-gen product portfolio – which is all of our most advanced products – all managed in Sophos Central, which is our cloud-based management platform, and that next-gen business was not only 60% of our total business, but it grew over 40% year over year in the last quarter. So we think that we’re on a very nice trajectory and with the help of Thoma Bravo, we fully expect …

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