Blogger: Mark Diodati
You may have read about Quest’s acquisition of NetPro today. The NetPro acquisition follows Quest’s acquisition of Vintela in 2005, and PassGo Technologies in 2008. The Vintela product (now Quest Authentication Services) owns a large piece of the Active Directory (AD) bridge market pie, which includes Centrify, Likewise, and Symark. We’re seeing a lot of traction in large enterprises for this class of products. These products provide authentication, authorization, and SSO services for non-Windows workstations and servers by integrating them into the AD environment.
The PassGo Technologies acquisition brought UNIX security (the jewel of the acquisition, now called Quest Privilege Manager for UNIX), strong authentication (the Defender product suite), privileged account management (SafeKeeping), web access management (Webthority), and enterprise SSO (Quest Enterprise Single Sign-On). The acquisition of NetPro brings AD-centric provisioning tools (Access Manager, and Mission Control for management of Microsoft’s Identity Lifecycle Manager), as well as AD auditing, reporting, and security policy tools.
Many synergies exist between these technologies, and Quest has some integration work ahead. Quest is strong in the AD Bridge and UNIX security markets. Some products are not competitive, including the privileged account management and web access management products. That said, Quest’s acquisitions demonstrate the company’s desire to provide identity and security tools with an emphasis on operating systems - a niche with lots of upside.
Comments