The company, with a broad security portfolio including hardware, software and services, is being sold by Thoma Bravo LLC to funds advised by Bain Capital.
The purpose of the sale is to further grow Blue Coat's line of products and services, "and help us prepare to return to the public markets," said CEO Greg Clark. Blue Coat claims to have 400 of the Fortune 500 as its customers.
The sale price is a $1.1 billion premium on the $1.3 billion Thoma Bravo paid for it in 2012and is expected to close by mid-year, the companies said in a press release.
A managing director of Bain, David Humphrey, says it hopes to grow the company both from within and through further acquisitions. The company started life back in 1996 as CacheFlow and specialized in WAN optimization. Over the years it has bought other firms for SSL VPN, URL filtering, anti-virus, caching, bandwidth-management, virtualization, parental control, and threat analysis technologies.
With all that the company describes itself as a hybrid-defense vendor and claims to have the largest global cloud security infrastructure.
The company had been rumored to be for sale for some time, with Raytheon reportedly showing interest but without making an offer.