Thursday, February 19, 2009

Novell recognizes privileged account management

Novell Strengthens Identity and Security Leadership Position Through Strategic Acquisitions

One of those acquisitions was of a company called Fortefi. According to the website:
Novell Privileged User Manager limits corporate susceptibility to unauthorized transactions and information access by helping organizations rapidly deploy super user management and tracking across all UNIX/Linux environments. The result: organizations can reduce the cost, complexity and risk associated with managing superusers across the enterprise.
Novell is the first suite vendor to jump into this market in a serious way (no, I don't consider TAMOS serious). I wonder how long before CA and IBM jump in with both feet? Who are the likely targets?

One other interesting note in the press release was the fact that Novell acquired the technology assets of Fortefi. Generally, this usually means that the company was swirling around the bankruptcy bowl and Novell just bought the intellectual property. I always wonder what a company is getting when they acquire the assets - after all, it usually means the product was already difficult to sell otherwise they wouldn't have been swirling the bowl. I guess time will tell, eh?

In either case, if you have been watching Novell like I have, you've seen these guys continue to build out their identity management portfolio. They've been a steady horse in this arena since they announced DirXML back in my Zoomit days.

p.s. Shout out to my friend Nick Nikols over at Novell: Good job Nick!

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1 comment:

Ian said...

Surely Cyber Ark's on someone's watch list. Although my gut thinks IBM will probably do something in the GRC space first.

Oh, and I agree with you on the TAMOS comment. The same could be said for CA Access Control :-)