Google buys into security, acquires GreenBorder
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Google has jumped into the anti-malware market, snatching up browser-based security software maker GreenBorder Technologies for an undisclosed amount of money.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Google acquired voice communications management company GrandCentral on Monday, a move that it hopes will strengthen its service offerings.
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Security vendor is expanding to Web applications with acquisition of firewall vendor.
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InfoWorld - Google has acquired FeedBurner, a provider of publishing and advertising services for blogs and content syndication feed.
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Hewlett-Packard has agreed to buy Web application security specialist SPI Dynamics.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett Packard's acquisition of Web applications security specialist SPI Dynamics on June 19 illustrates a growing demand among enterprise customers to have vulnerability-scanning tools integrated into their software development platforms. Following closely behind IBM's June 6 acquisition of Watchfire, one of Atlanta-based SPI's closest rivals in the Web applications and software code-scanning space, the HP buyout highlights the rapidly emerging trend toward integration of security testing tools into the software development process. HP, which acquired software development giant Mercury Interactive for $4.5 billion in cash in July 2006 in a move that greatly expanded its interests in the area, said that it plans to blend SPI's business and its 140 person staff into the software unit at its Technology Solutions Group, the division responsible for its server and storage products, as well as its IT consulting services. In response to the growing threat of attacks on applications-level vulnerabilities, the company said, more customers than ever before are building security testing requirements into their development projects. By folding applications security testing into its existing portfolio of tools, HP officials said, the company has added an increasingly strategic piece of the overall software development puzzle. "This adds a new chapter to the applications side of the house; we think of applications and [IT] operations working together, and this adds the piece of security assessment from early on in the [software development] lifecycle all the way through to production," said Jonathan Rende, vice president of products for the Quality Management Software group at HP. "This is a new dimension of that, that is so complementary because there is a whole set of users who are getting involved in security assessment in the lifecycle," Rende said on a conference call with media and analysts. "There are security experts who determine policies and prepare applications before they go live, but then there are also the developers and quality assurance professionals who need to ensure security before the applications go live." In a research report published by market analysis firm Gartner in May 2007, industry experts said that by 2009, some 80 percent of major software development lifecycle vendors would offer source code security scanning tools as part of their platforms. The company said that further that 60 percent of IT organizations will have made vulnerability detection an integral part of their development process by 2010. HP's move to buy SPI and IBM's acquisition of Watchfire provide tacit evidence that those predictions are already coming to pass, said Joseph Feiman, the Gartner analyst who authored the report. "In a span of two weeks, two of the largest applications security companies have been acquired by development platform providers, which proves that users of those platforms understand that having applications security as a discipline is as important to them as network or operational security," said Feiman. "This is the part of security that is being built into applications by customers, and it should be an integral part of these [software development] platforms to allow them to do that work." In addition to appeasing customers who are already calling for integrated applications security testing tools, the HP-SPI and IBM-Watchfire deals should increase the trend toward software developers making security auditing part of their everyday work, the analyst said. SPI has been a longtime partner of HP, which has offered its tools as a package with its Mercury and OpenView software development products -- just as Watchfire had been selling its applications security products packaged with IBM's Rational code-authoring tools before getting snapped-up by the firm. Both platform providers' moves to bring security testing capabilities under their own control should benefit their individual marketing efforts and customers' development lifecycle plans, other analysts said. "SPI had integration with Mercury from a partner standpoint, but that type of a relationship is never as tight as it is within a product suite produced by the same company, and SPI will now be able to take better advantage of HP's installed base of customers," said Dr. Chenxi Wang, analyst with Forrester Research. "Mercury is the leader of the quality testing market, and customers are increasingly making vulnerability testing a part of that type of work, as opposed to an afterthought, so it makes a lot of sense of HP to make this type of deal," Wang said. One of the most significant benefits of adding SPI in particular is that it has both Web applications inspection and source code scanning tools in-house in the form of its WebInspect and DevInspect product lines respectively, along with its own QAInspect quality assurance tools, said the analyst. SPI's combination of code and applications analysis software may give HP an advantage over its rivals, including IBM, Wang said, as she cited Watchfire's forte as based in pure Web applications assessment -- work typically done by quality and assurance testers -- not in technologies built specifically for use by applications developers. "HP has a commitment to pushing this type of security technology deeper into the development lifecycle, integrating with Mercury now makes a lot of sense to their long-term vision," said Wang -- who has worked previously for the HP Labs research group as an independent consultant. "Having SPI's development-phase tools may give HP a leg-up over IBM-Watchfire; HP wants to be selling these types of tools directly to developers, not QA testers." According to a report issued earlier this month by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that develops technology standards, some 92 percent of all IT security vulnerabilities exist in software applications, which Wang cited as an "astounding" figure. With customers clamoring for a way to reduce their risk to such issues, HP and IBM have seen the business opportunity and moved to address it, she said. Other industry watchers noted that it will become increasingly difficult for standalone applications security providers to compete with the tools being integrated by companies with powerful development arms like HP and IBM. SPI Chief Executive Brian Cohen said he believes it will be hard for such companies to compete in light of the demand for integration with development platforms. To highlight the point, the CEO alluded to the fact that it may have been tough for SPI to maintain its partnership with IBM -- with whom its products have also been packaged for sale and consumption -- in light of the Watchfire deal. "Our belief was that the ultimate success of SPI would be to see our technology integrated into a broadly distributed platform sold to software developers, and it is clear that organizations such as HP feel the same way," Cohen said. "I don't see a standalone business long-term without integration for these types of technologies." However, officials with SPI rivals like Cenzic said that while security testing is being built into the software development process, there are still millions of applications already in production that will need vulnerability assessment tools that aren't tied to one development platform or another. "There are 50 to 100 million Web applications out there, and less than one percent is being tested for security vulnerabilities, so the scope of the opportunity is still huge outside of development," said Mandeep Khera, vice president of marketing for Cenzic. "Everyone in this industry has been hoping to have developers and quality assurance groups buying our products, but that's not really happening yet; there has been a big movement with more people budgeting for these tools over the last nine months, but there's still a long way to go." Cenzic has existing relationships with both HP and IBM, and Khera said that he believes the firm will be able to continue to market itself to those companies' customers, in particular those firms who use both development platforms or want to keep applications security testing as a separate process. HP officials said that the SPI buyout will not preclude it from continuing to work with its other existing vulnerability assessment partners. While Khera said that there may come a time when Cenzic considers a sale to a larger software development or security player if the timing is right, the executive maintains that his company has no immediate plans to begin marketing itself for acquisition. However, some industry watchers see the HP-SPI and IBM-Watchfire deals as a sure sign that additional consolidation is on tap across the applications security and software quality assurance segments. "The game isn't over; there will probably be a few more acquisitions as the securing of applications is becoming a function of applications development, so it's likely that development platforms and tool suites become the home for more of these products and companies," said Jon Oltsik, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "It's hard to sell security testing tools after-the-fact. Customers and vendors really do want to introduce this into initial sale of development tools, it broadens your portfolio if you're HP or IBM, and you can push security up as a priority to developers," he said. "These companies had a tough time selling their tools as standalone products, and as a result, I'd expect to see more of these deals."
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(InfoWorld) - Google has acquired FeedBurner, a provider of publishing and advertising services for blogs and content syndication feed. FeedBurner's technology will boost Google's ad network and Web publishing services, Google said. Terms of the deal, which has closed, weren't revealed. FeedBurner will continue operating as it has until now, so existing customers shouldn't experience any interruptions in service. New customers will be able to continue signing up for FeedBurner services as well. Meanwhile, Google will work to integrate FeedBurner's technologies with a number of its own products. The volume of Web content and advertising delivered via RSS and Atom feeds has increased significantly in recent years, and Google feels that by acquiring FeedBurner it will be able to capitalize on this growth and expand its advertising reach. FeedBurner, which has more than 400,000 publishers on its network, will beef up Google's own AdSense publisher network, particularly among blogs, where FeedBurner is stronger than Google, said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google, during a press conference. Likewise, Google advertisers will benefit from an expanded ad inventory and ad distribution platform. Finally, FeedBurner shares Google's philosophy of helping end-users find information online with FeedBurner focused on blogs and feeds and Google on search. "We think this will be a win for users, publishers, and advertisers on the Internet," she said. FeedBurner, a privately-held company founded in 2003, helps publishers and advertisers with "the spiraling complexity" of online media distribution compounded by RSS feeds, widget applications, and mobile devices, said Dick Costolo, FeedBurner's CEO and co-founder. "FeedBurner's focus on delivering the right media to the right end point and measuring all that for the publisher means we've got a great opportunity to combine our vision with Google's vision for organizing the world's information," he said. Despite the executives' enthusiasm, they acknowledged that prior to the acquisition, neither Google nor FeedBurner blocked their respective publishers and advertisers from signing up for each other's services. Because nothing has prevented publishers and advertisers from taking advantage of both companies' offerings, the real benefits will not materialize until concrete integration happens between the companies' services and operations. "We're working on how the products will be integrated, but we want AdWords advertisers to very easily have access to the feeds, and we want the FeedBurner publishers to potentially have access to other Google services," Wojcicki said. Google hasn't been as active as it should have been in the area of syndicated feed advertising, she said. Beyond the obvious synergy with the Google ad network, FeedBurner services and products could be complementary to Google's syndicated feed manager Reader and Google's Analytics service for tracking sites' usage, she said. FeedBurner, which has about 30 employees and raised about $10 million in venture capital funding, will keep its operations in Chicago, Costolo said. This story was updated on June 1, 2007
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Security software maker announces plans to acquire Hacker Safe site certifier in a cash deal worth approximately $51 million.
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Google has agreed to acquire e-mail security firm Postini in a $625 million deal, the two companies said Monday. The agreement would further Google's push into the enterprise market.
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You know the name, but Google's probably not your first thought when pondering hosted security options. But a spate of recent buys indicates the company has serious designs on the space.
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Google has acquired FeedBurner, a provider of publishing and advertising services for blogs and content syndication feed.
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Another day... another Google acquisition: this one giving yet more confirmation that Google has its eye on the enterprise. The search giant announced yesterday that it has acquired Postini, a security and compliance services provider, for a cool $625 million in cash.
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Search giant Google said Wednesday that it has acquired Keyhole, a company specializing in Web-based software that allows people to view satellite images from around the globe.
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(InfoWorld) - Security has been a bit of a black art at Google. Unlike rival Microsoft, which publishes detailed information on its monthly patches and has openly evangelized the steps it takes to secure software, Google has generally been quiet when it comes to talking about security, and it has kept the team that keeps Google's Web sites secure under wraps. Not so anymore. In April, Google researchers presented a paper on Web security at a technical conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discussing the results of the company's ongoing effort to "identify all Web pages on the Internet that could potentially be malicious." A month later, Google started its first-ever security blog, and since then, observers have had their first glimpse into the lives of Google's 100-person security team. That team is managed by Douglas Merrill, Google's vice president of engineering and CIO, who spoke with IDG News Service recently. Merrill wouldn't say anything about Google'sÂ recent acquisition of secure browsing software vendor GreenBorder, but he did explain what Google gets from its security investments, and why his company believes that locking down the enterprise PC is not the way to go. Following is an edited transcript of the interview. IDGNS: Google is trying to identify all of the malicious Web pages on the Internet. Can you tell me about that effort? Merrill: We believe that by trying to find badware out there, we can materially help our users. We can do it by flagging it in Toolbar, we can do it by using things like Stopbadware.org to try and help people address them. Information is power in this context, and our goal is to make all the information in the world accessible and useful. That set of work by Niels [Google security specialist Niels Provos] and others is a really great scientific advance toward understanding what the world looks like. And in fact, the coverage of that line of work is part of what led us to step over the curb and start the Google security blog. Because some of the coverage in the [press], Dr. Provos found misleading. He actually got so energized about it that he came to Barry, [Google spokesman Barry Schnitt] and said, "I want to start a malware blog." And Barry said why don't we just do this security blog. We'd been talking about it forever, we just never got around to doing it. So we had a long internal conversation, and our initial worry was we wanted to be transparent and engage our users in a discussion about security, but we didn't want to have one posting and have the thing die. We want to have an ongoing discussion. IDGNS: Does Google ever think of security as something it could turn into a product? Merrill: In some sense, the answer is clearly "yes" because part of Checkout is a security product. But fundamentally, we are a search company. We do search. We want to do things that make users feel safe and secure on the Internet to do searches. I have no idea what we'll do in the future. I don't have a crystal ball. But we're a search company, and what we want to do is help people be able to do searches and learn things and make all the world's information universally accessible and useful. And part of being useful is being secure. IDGNS: Niels Provos was quoted recently as saying that the firewall is dead. What are your thoughts on that? Merrill: Niels's point was that, increasingly, business technology and enterprise technology can't be separated from the Internet and can't be separated from what consumers do. And businesses, increasingly, are using partnerships to get things done. Increasingly, when I go off and I give discussions to other CIOs, what we talk about is the consumerizaiton of enterprise technology. The increasing integration of consumer technology into the enterprise space. So what Niels was talking about was this idea that you can't live your whole life behind one set of walls anymore. Everything that your employees do every day will include stuff they do at home, stuff that other companies have done. We obviously believe in this idea of the Web 2.0, where you're collecting different kinds of applications together to meet consumer needs. The firewall is one line of defense, and it's still useful, just like locks on front doors are still useful. But you need other kinds of defenses as well. You may need application development standards, you may need inter-organizational understanding of things like Stopbadware.org. It's no longer that security is something you can write a check for. Security is a process. There are no lasting technical solutions to social problems. You can't write a check to solve a social problem. So Niels is absolutely right. We think security of the future is a far more complex community based activity. It takes a village. We want to be part of the village. IDGNS: That's interesting because it is in opposition to the trend of locking out social networking sites and locking down the functionality of the PC. It sounds like you guys believe that that's not going to work. Merrill: We believe that in the long run, enterprise technology will be consumerized. We have more than 100,000 domains in Google Apps so far. So 100,000 different domains have decided that the right way for them to run their enterprise applications is to have us do it. And to have us do it with consumer-grade applications because the consumer-grade application involving search, free text unstructured search, involving things like conversation views and connections of threads in e-mails, involving secure document storage and access control, those things are so powerful that enterprises can use them. IDGNS: But do you see yourself in opposition to the trend of locking down the PC? Merrill: I think we see ourselves in opposition to that trend. Obviously, you have to manage things like bandwidth utilization. So in some sense, some of the locking down is done for that reason. Sometimes it's done for regulatory or other reasons. But in general we believe that the world where your business computer is very tightly coupled only to business use and business applications are very complex and really rich and complicated and are very hard to use, we believe that those days are coming to an end.
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Google Inc, the world's Web search  leader, told U.S. Senate lawmakers on Thursday the company is  pursuing new technologies to protect the privacy of Internet  users as it seeks to acquire advertising company DoubleClick  Inc.
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Internet search company Google Inc.  has acquired Keyhole Corp., a supplier of online satellite maps that allow users to zoom down to street level to specific locations, Google said on Wednesday.
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Analysis: With the acquisition of Postini, Google strengthens its business solutions offerings.