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Blue Coat probably couldn’t have found a better new home than Thoma Bravo, the multibillion dollar private equity firm with a broad portfolio of security and technology companies. These investors understand IT vendors, particularly security, and have an appreciation for the value the channel brings an IT company.

Beyond the size and scope of the Blue Coat acquisition is the family of security companies Blue Coat joins under the Thoma Bravo umbrella. It’s also home to the likes of SonicWall, LANDesk Software, Tripwire, Entrust, NetIQ and Attachmate. While each of these companies operates as separate entities, they represent clear and distinct security facets.

Independent operations under private equity is the conventional model for companies like Blue Coat and SonicWall when they’re bought by firms like Thoma Bravo. When SonicWall was acquired last year, most of the senior management team, including CEO Matt Medeiros, was retained. Thoma Bravo allows SonicWall and its other companies to conduct business with little interference.

However, vendors with related technologies that fall under sole or majority ownership of active investors such as Thoma Bravo often leverage the connections of related portfolio companies to help extend sales reach and accelerate growth. This was one of the benefits Medeiros was looking forward to after sealing the deal with Thoma Bravo.

Private equity rarely steps in to change business models or executive leadership unless there’s something fundamentally broken. Most earnestly believe in the notion of letting business specialists do their jobs while they tend to their core competency – namely investing.

It’s not unheard of, though, for private equity firms to “roll up” their portfolio companies to create new ventures with greater scale capabilities. Usually roll-up programs are done out of economics and not technology. The owners see the ability to eliminate resources and fix expenses.

And that’s where Thoma Bravo looks very interesting.

If you stop looking at Thoma Bravo as just another investment firm, its security portfolio starts looking like the ingredients for a super-security vendor.

Blue Coat brings Web filtering and Web security technologies, as well as WAN optimization. It competes primarily against Websense on security, and Riverbed and F5 in WAN optimization.

SonicWall brings next-generation firewalls, conventional firewalls, unified threat management and data backup solutions. SonicWall even has antivirus. It has a broad array of competitors, including Fortinet, WatchGuard Technologies, Check Point and McAfee.

Entrust is a mature security vendor specializing in digital certificates for encryption, SSL VPNs and identity management. It competes against companies like Symantec (VeriSign) and RSA (EMC’s security division).

LANDesk provides endpoint security and management solutions. With LANDesk, users and service providers can remotely monitor, configure and secure PCs and other network-attached devices. It would be imprecise to call LANDesk a remote monitoring and management tool, but these capabilities do place it against companies like Level Platforms and N-able. It’s also similar to Microsoft Windows InTune.

TripWire, another legendary security company, provides solutions that keep network-attached security appliances and switches configured to known good states. If an authorized configuration changes, TripWire will detect the problem and revert to the last known good position.

Attachmate is fast becoming a portfolio company in and of itself. It’s products range from terminal emulation to managed file transfer to mainframe management. It bought NetIQ, a security systems management solutions provider, and it also owns Novell, which includes robust and under-appreciated enterprise identity management solutions.

If Thoma Bravo were to combine all these security assets, it would create a security mega-powerhouse with solutions that range from endpoint to network protections, identity management access control, encryption and digital certificates, and Web security and application performance. It would be a multi-billion-dollar company and a formidable competitor in the marketplace.

Now it’s fun to imagine the creation of a new vendor forming like this, as if it were some fantasy football team. The logistical integration of vastly different companies with varying degrees of maturity and culture would be nightmarish, and there would be no guarantee of success. The last time we saw an attempt at a super group was in 2004 when BeTrusted, TruSecure and Ubizen – three struggling security services firms – merged to form one large struggling security services firm. It was eventually acquired by Verizon and absorbed into the labyrinth of enterprise services.

But, if not for a moment, it’s fun to think of what you could do with such a powerful portfolio as the one continuing to grow under Thoma Bravo.

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