Division | |
Industry | Security software and services |
Fate | Acquired by McAfee |
Founded | 1984 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. (spun off from Honeywell) |
(as Secure Computing Technology Center)
Headquarters | San Jose, California, U.S. |
Key people
|
Dan Ryan, President, CEO Richard Scott, Chairman |
Products | Security appliances and hosted services |
Revenue | $237.9 million USD (2007) |
Number of employees
|
~1000 (2007) |
Parent | McAfee, Inc. |
Website | www.securecomputing.com |
Secure Computing Corporation, or SCC, was a public company that developed and sold computer security appliances and hosted services to protect users and data. McAfee acquired the company in 2008.
The company also developed filtering systems used by governments such as Iran and Saudi Arabia that blocks their citizens from accessing information on the Internet.
In 1984, a research group called the Secure Computing Technology Center (SCTC) was formed at Honeywell in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The centerpiece of SCTC was its work on security-evaluated operating systems for the NSA. This work included the Secure Ada Target (SAT) and the Logical Coprocessing Kernel (LOCK), both designed to meet the stringent A1 level of the Trusted Computer Systems Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC).
Over the next several years, Secure Computing morphed from a small defense contractor into a commercial product vendor, largely because the investment community was much less interested in purchasing security goods from defense contractors than from commercial product vendors, especially vendors in the growing Internet space.
Secure Computing became a publicly traded company in 1995. Following the pattern of other Internet-related startups, the stock price tripled its first day: it opened at $16 a share and closed at $48. The price peaked around $64 in the next several weeks and then collapsed over the following year or so. It ranged between roughly $3 and $20 afterward until the company was purchased by McAfee.
The company headquarters were moved to San Jose, California, in 1998, though the bulk of the workforce remained in the Twin Cities. The Roseville employees completed a move to St. Paul, Minnesota, in February 2006. Several other sites now exist, largely the result of mergers.