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Congratulations to Counterpane, which announced last week that it has been acquired by British Telecomm as part of the global carrier's campaign to deliver best-of-class security services to multi-national enterprises.

The company's founder, Bruce Schneier (whom Economist calls "the security guru") pitched me on his vision in 1999, but it was his book Secrets and Lies that compelled me to invest, along with Accel. (You can see many ideas from that book plagiarized in my blog posts.)

In fact, Bruce's position as CTO of the company seems to have captured Europe's attention--but not for his scholarly works, his media contributions, his cryptographic inventions, his widely read (125,000) newsletter Cryptogram and blog Schneier on Security, or his invention of the Security Monitoring Services industry. No, Britain is all atwitter because a fictional character in a novel once mentioned Bruce's name! That's the big story here, according to the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Times, and of course the Sun (pictured here).

Oddly they are also reporting a price on the company which is significantly under-stated (I don't know why). Anyway, it wasn't a home run for the investors, but it was a nice outcome.

Regardless, the company's success reflects heroic execution by CEO Paul Stich, VP Ops Doug Howard, VP Sales Kevin Senator, CFO Criss Harms and many others. Launched at the height of the bubble, the team scraped through the downturn years and emerged as the dominant independent company in the high end market for security monitoring services.

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