Antivirus software vendor McAfee will sell off its McAfee Research division to Sparta as part of a move to streamline its operations.
Sparta will take over all of McAfee Research's existing contracts, McAfee said on Tuesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, though McAfee said it expects the deal to close in the next 90 days.
McAfee Research conducts computer and network security research in a variety of areas, including intrusion prevention, security management, attacks and vulnerabilities, the company said. In recent years, McAfee Research's clients have included the U.S.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Security Agency, the U.S. Army Research Laboratories and Hewlett-Packard Co., among others.
Sparta is an employee-owned systems engineering and advanced technology company whose primary operations are divided into three sections: defense and space systems, hardware systems and information systems.
McAfee Research has been handling an increasing amount of classified work in recent years, and less of the unclassified projects that it handled historically, McAfee said.
The sale of McAfee Research does not mean that the company will no longer conduct its own research. McAfee will continue to conduct research into malicious code and vulnerabilities through its McAfee Antivirus and Vulnerability Emergency Response Team, it said.
