Sophos has kicked off 2007 by bolstering its product portfolio with the acquisition of US-based VPN and network access control specialist Endforce.

The move comes just days after the antivirus specialist partnered with SurfControl and launched a new enterprise security appliance.

Rob Forsyth, managing director of Sophos Asia-Pacific, said the acquisition of privately held Endforce will fill some important gaps in the company's product offerings.

"[The acquisition] gives us some of the elements we need for vulnerability assessment and compliance reporting. Our current client firewall doesn't have VPN but Endforce started their life as a VPN company," Forsyth told ZDNet Australia in a telephone interview.

Endforce already partners with some of the biggest names in security and networking, which should help Sophos gain a stronger foothold in the enterprise security market.

"Endforce is a network access control company. It gives us an agent and an agent-less NAC and [Endforce] is already partners with Cisco, 3Com, Juniper, McAfee and Symantec," said Forsyth.

Sophos, which bought the company using its cash reserves, did not disclose terms of the acquisition, which Forsyth said is the company's first in a number of years.

"Sophos has been a very frugal, stable, sensible, conservative company for 20 years and has always tended to be profitable so we can draw on cash reserves strategically," he said.

On Tuesday, Sophos launched the WS1000 enterprise security appliance and announced a partnership with SurfControl, which means that customers of the appliance -- and eventually of other Sophos products -- will enjoy access to SurfControl's Internet threat database that contains three billion Web pages.

"Without SurfControl, [the WS1000] does application control and URL filtering. We have a number of different search companies and have visibility of billions of Web pages.

"However, the thing we didn't do, which SurfControl did better, was add a database of Web sites," added Forsyth.