Sourcefire gaining financial strength

Sourcefire increased year-over-year second quarter revenue and earnings and predicted an even better third quarter.

By Ellen Messmer

July 29, 2010 — Network World —

Sourcefire, a 10-year-old firm specializing in intrusion detection and prevention, Thursday announced increased year-over-year second quarter revenue and earnings and predicted an even better third quarter.

Is open source Snort dead?

The company reported second quarter revenue of $30.6 million, up 38% from second quarter a year ago and up nearly 19% from the first quarter. Adjusted net income was $3.3 million, more than double that from second quarter last year. The third quarter looks still brighter with at least $34.3 million in revenues expected by the company.

Sourcefire was founded in 2001 by CTO Martin Roesch, who created the Snort open-source IDS/IPS technology. The company struggled in its earlier years to gain financial momentum with its commercial Snort-based offerings, but finally hit profitability during the second half of last year.

"We made $500,000," says Greg Fitzgerald, senior vice president of marketing. "It was a banner year."

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Today Sourcefire has about 320 employees, mostly in offices in the Washington, D.C. area around the beltway like so many other security companies. But it also keeps offices internationally in London and Singapore.

According to Fitzgerald, 30% of Sourcefire's business stems from government — federal, state and local — and 22% of that total is the feds, including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, along with some civilian agencies. But the bulk of Sourcefire's customers — accounting for 70% of its revenue base —lives in the commercial sector, with financial, manufacturing and education being the top industry segments.

Sourcefire's bread-and-butter remains its IPS appliances based on open-source Snort, though it is making its first foray into intrusion-detection and prevention software specifically for virtualized platforms.

Sourcefire's latest venture is an open-source project called Razorback to build a type of malware-defense system based on mirroring incoming files to designated open-source and commercial security tools on the network for analysis. There are no known commercial plans around this yet. But Fitzgerald says Sourcefire can be expected to make announcements in the September timeframe regarding several new ideas, products and projects going forward.

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