AT&T is the latest company in a growing list to announce a business acquisition with their October 1 purchase of VeriSign, Inc.'s Global Security Consulting Services business unit for an undisclosed amount. The announcement continues a string of acquisitions within the government technology market over the last few months as firms look to weather the downturn in commercial markets through stronger public sector performance.

The telecommunications giant will seek to leverage VeriSign's security and risk assessment expertise with its existing network security services to further penetrate the global enterprise security market. Given recent and well-publicized attacks on government networks and the Obama Administration's emphasis on cybersecurity it is likely that the combined practice will focus part of its efforts on the US federal information security market, which INPUT estimates as an $8 billion vendor-addressable market for 2010.

The addition of the VeriSign unit could also position AT&T for greater work under the GSA Networx communications services contracts, which could bring over $7 billion of total business their way over the life of the contracts. The increased security competency might also help drive a more rapid transition by federal agencies to Networx than has been the case so far. The divestiture by VeriSign will, in part, allow them to focus resources on other cybersecurity areas like authentication and their distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) solutions.

So the M&A trend continues with this latest news and since October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month the timing seems fitting.