McAfee today announced it intends to acquire Solidcore Systems for about US$33 million in cash and an additional $14 million if certain performance targets are met.

McAfee indicated its interest in the acquisition centered on Solidcore's whitelisting technology that can set controls on what applications are allowed to run on a computer. After the acquisition is completed, McAfee expects to bring Solidcore's whitelisting and compliance enforcement mechanisms into the McAfee product line under the management umbrella of the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management console.

Solidcore's current product line includes S3 Control, software for change control and configuration audit, among other products, such as the Point-of-Sale Check and Control software used in electronic POS devices.

"We will continue to invest further from the engineering and sales perspective," said Candace Worley, McAfee vice president of product management for the systems security business unit, who says McAfee will support Solidcore's current product line and customer base.

Solidcore is said to have about 1,000 customers, including NCR, Dell and General Motors, and is mainly focused on North America. McAfee would like to extend Solidcore's products to other markets globally. The products are used on more than 200,000 endpoints, which include Automated Teller Machines, POS systems, mobile devices, process-control systems, servers and workstations.

McAfee anticipates that Solidcore's whitelisting and security-controls technology, which can assist in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards for payment-card processing, could also find use in making virtualisation-based environments more secure. "We could leverage application whitelisting for securing a virtual environment," Worley noted.

The Solidcore acquisition is expected to be completed by mid-year.