Behrman's pickup of Tresys named 2013's best intell deal

When Tresys Technology went on the market, industry ears perked up, and many jumped at the chance to buy the company. At the end of the day, the company went with the offer that provided the best value to the sellers, and that offer came from Behrman Capital.

Private equity will be a change of pace for Tresys. “It means a chance for growth and the transformation of what was a very good company – which was primarily run as a lifestyle business – to really begin to mature into a high value growth company that continues to focus on emerging trends and technology and cybersecurity, particularly defensive cybersecurity,” said Tresys Technology CEO Robert Stalick.

Tresys’ position as a strong player in the cybersecurity and intelligence markets was enough to bump up the Behrman Capital deal to the best intelligence-related deal of 2013, and it united a number of services and products which is considered attractive in today’s market, where intellectual property and differentiation are considered valuable.

The deal will allow Tresys to tackle new challenges and get in front of new customers and markets, Stalick said, who came onto the Tresys team after the deal went down in January 2013. He wasn’t alone; retired Gen. Peter Pace came on board as chairman, as well, in addition to his serving as an operating partner at Behrman Capital.

Along with the rest of Behrman, “we have the support of a well-known group of investors who have a lot of experience to bring to the table to advise us,” Stalick said.

Moving forward, the company is looking at where the problems in the cybersecurity market are, as those problems will be business opportunities for the company. “We have historically been a specialist in protecting the most critical systems or types of systems in the U.S. intelligence and defense communities against the most sophisticated types of threats in places where there isn’t a lot of margin for error or compromise,” Stalick said.

The company brings a number of services to the table, including secure information sharing, operating system security and mobility, systems assurance and cybersecurity consulting.

In addition to services, the company brings product offerings, too, including Tresys XD Air, the only approved solution for sanitizing and transferring data via portable media, and XD Bridge, which allows for cross domain data sharing in the defense and intelligence space.

In addition to XD Air and XD Bridge, the company offers Tresys MobileFortress for Android, which is a highly secure version of Android for mobile devices that helps protect against spoofing, malware, greyware, rooting and other attack vectors on mobile devices.

The three offerings are especially important because they are tied to the commercial sector, which the company plans to move further into going forward.

“Government clearly is an important customer for us in the mobile space, and we work closely with a number of agencies, but it is in the commercial enterprises that sheer volume of deployed devices will create threats to mobile devices that can only be solved by truly robust security like MobileFortress,” Stalick said.

Aside from moving further into the commercial market, the company is focused on organic growth. “We’re tending to our own knitting. We’re not looking at any acquisitions, we’re all about developing organic growth and exercising new markets organically,” he said.

That said, Stalick emphasized that the company will continue to follow the problems sets that Tresys is a specialist in, and will continue to work with its customers to meet their mission.