Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Hitachi buys majority of M-Tech


Update: I'm at RSA and managed to bump into Idan Shoham who is M-Tech's CTO. He confirmed that he already likes sushi and that he was flying to Tokyo at the end of the week. All is well from his perspective.

Consolidation continues!!! Just forwarded to me from one our guys in our APAC division. Original article is on "ARN".


Looking to expand its line of identity management products, Hitachi has bought a majority ownership interest in M-Tech Information Technology, a vendor of password management software.

Hitachi already sells authentication products that identify the patterns of the veins in a person's finger to confirm the user's identity. The company expects that the M-Tech products will help expand this product line by giving the company new software to help manage functions on the back end.

So, what does this mean? Bye-bye M-Tech. My friends up in Calgary are going to be busy integrating with Hitachi's "finger-vein authentication system" which, according to the article, "is used by about 80 percent of the Japanese financial institutions". I hope you guys like sushi.

If I were an M-Tech customer I'd be worried. Also, why buy a majority of M-Tech but not all of it?? That seems weird but I'm no financial rocket scientist.

Unfortunately, I don't associate Hitachi with identity management. Maybe this is a big area for Hitachi in Japan but what about the rest of the world?

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1 comment:

Ruberhunter said...

First, I hardly view M-tech as an Identity management company. Now, password reset, yes. M-tech did one thing very well, sell a commodity in tactical situations where the customer was looking for a short-term solution to stop the bleeding. There technology is not cutting edge nor do they have any significant subject matter or vertical expertise. No, M-tech is simply a "Hustler" looking for a score. I think Hitachi new this and this is why they went for majority stakeholder. So, why? Perhaps to play catch up...RSA/EMC.

At the end of the day, the only real news will be EMC's response.