SiliconBeat

Blue Coat Systems, the Sunnyvale maker of networking security tools that lost its chief financial officer in March to a San Diego energy firm, said today that it would postpone the release of its earnings for its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter ended April 30 “in order to enable the company to complete its financial statements for the period.”

The postponement came in light of the company needing to Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Coat Systems is losing its chief financial officer, Kevino Royal, who is going green by joining Maxwell Technologies, the San Diego maker of energy storage and power delivery systems.

Royal, 44, has been with the Sunnyvale network security company since since 2005, taking over from Bob Verheecke, who was later charged, Read the rest of this entry »

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Blue Coat Systems and its former chief financial officer Robert Verheecke, alleging that they backdated stock option grants to executives and employees and reported false financial information to shareholders.

The complaint against the Sunnyvale network security company and its ex-CFO alleges that Read the rest of this entry »

Never let it be said that we are all doom and gloom here at Docu-Drama World headquarters. Let us now take a moment to recognize the remarkable turnaround at Blue Coat Systems (ticker:BCSI) of Sunnyvale, and the subsequent good fortune that came with a timely private equity investment.

By way of background, Blue Coat was originally known as CacheFlow, and made a kind of Internet storage product. The company went public in November 1999, and just a couple of weeks later, its stock soared to a split adjusted $411.72 per share. Long story short, by the summer of 2002, the stock was hovering above $1 per share, and gasping for air.

Soon after, the company did the dreaded reverse split of its stock, at a one-to-five ratio. And it changed its business focus from online storage to hardware and software security products.

Fast forward to the summer of 2006. Demand has rebounded, the stock has been ticking up for several years. And then in September 2006, two private equity players, Francisco Partners and Sequoia Capital invest about $42 million to buy 2.4 million shares. Blue Coat used part of that money to help fund the acquisition of a unit of Network Appliance (ticker: NTAP) called NetCache.

In September, according to two form 4s, Francisco cashed out its 1.4 million shares for prices ranging from $75.55 to $87.20 per share to collect $117.3 million, a nice one-year return on its share of the investment that was orginially worth $24.9 million.

Meanwhile, Blue Coat is on such a strong run that its stock split 2-to-1 on Oct. 4. The stock has now risen 524 percent from a split-adjusted $6.44 per share on August 14, 2006 to $40.20 on Monday.