Fortinet acquires Meru Networks, looks to enterprise Wi-Fi market

Fortinet has closed its acquisition of Meru Networks for an approximate $44 million in cash. With the completion of the transaction, Meru employees officially join Fortinet.

This acquisition will enable Fortinet to expand on its secure wireless portfolio for enterprise customers and offer channel partners a broader solutions portfolio to take to market, according to the company.

The company plans on getting a stronger hold in the global enterprise Wi-FI market - currently worth $5 billion.

As such, Fortinet will broaden its solutions portfolio with integrated and intelligent secure wireless solutions.

Currently, Fortinet's primary secure Wi-Fi solutions are its FortiAP secure wireless access points, and FrotiWiFi integrated security appliances for enterprise branch offices and SMEs.

The company says these have been among the fastest growing products in its 'advanced technologies' portfolio.

Meru's intelligent Wi-Fi solutions will help Fortinet to deliver secure, uninterrupted user experience, according to the company.

"To truly protect against all possible attack vectors, we are continuing to expand our market-leading end-to-end security platform to provide customers with the visibility and continuous threat protection they need - from the data center, to the cloud to the end-point," says Ken Xie, Fortinet founder, chairman and CEO.

"We expect the acquisition of Meru to help us deliver new solutions and services to help enterprises of all sizes deploy, manage, and secure wired and wireless networks in a mobile era," he says.

Fortinet first completed the tender offer for all outstanding shares of Meru by accepting for payment all such shares validly tendered and not properly withdrawn as of the expiration time of the tender offer, which represented approximately 60.18% of Meru's outstanding shares.

Subsequently, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fortinet merged with and into Meru, resulting in Meru becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortinet.

As a result of the merger, all remaining shares of Meru not purchased by Fortinet in the tender offer (other than shares owned by Meru, Fortinet or their subsidiaries and shares subject to properly exercised appraisal rights claims) were converted into the right to receive the aforementioned cash payment.

All shares of Meru are expected to be delisted from the NASDAQ stock market.