IBM to buy Web application security vendor Watchfire
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IBM has agreed to buy Watchfire, a developer of web application security auditing tools, and plans to incorporate it into its Rational business unit.
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(InfoWorld) - Google believes that its consumer-grade Web applications represent the future of enterprise IT. But while Google is quick to trumpet its products' innovative features, the search giant hasn't said much about their security. Until recently, that is. On Monday,Â Google announcedÂ it would spend $625 million to buy messaging security vendor Postini, a move that will give it access to 35,000 business customers, and provide it with the first security products for its Google Apps portfolio. The Postini acquisition represents the most significant investment into security technology yet made by Google. In recent months, Google has started its own security blog along withÂ acquiring another security-related startup, Green Border Technologies. Google Apps customers will be able to use Postini services for tasks like scanning and encrypting e-mail, and archiving messages for compliance and legal purposes, said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager for Google's enterprise business, during a Monday conference call. Around 1,000 small businesses are signing up for Google Apps each day, according to Google. But the company admitted that big businesses have been reluctant to use hosted services because of concerns about security and corporate compliance issues. It hopes that buying Postini will help relieve those concerns. But now that Google has finally decided to become a security vendor, how far will it go? Rival Microsoft has started buying security companies itself, and recently introduced its own line of antivirus software. And Google's recent Green Border purchase has caused some to speculate that the search giant may soon offer a secure Web browser, locked down with Green Border's safe browsing technology. Google has so far refused to say what it plans to do with Green Border's products, but observers see other opportunities ahead. For example, the company could mine its vast database of Web sites to compete with Web filtering companies like Websense or AE6 Technologies. "There's a lot of money to be made by establishing a blacklist of Web sites," said Forrester Research Principal Analyst Chenxi Wang. "I would not be surprised if once they used their massive crawling infrastructure to turn that into a proprietary list and sell that with their enterprise product line." Google recently gave Web developers a way to access this data for free, but the company could build paid services for enterprise users on top of the free product, much in the same way it has developed Google Apps, observers said. "If they add real-time intelligence and put that in an enterprise product, they can definitely make money," Wang said. Wang predicted that Google may also look to acquire information leak prevention companies such as Vontu or Vericept. One of Google's harshest critics on the security front said that things might become even more interesting should Google decide to expand its foothold on the desktop. "If they want to build their own operating system and they want to basically start making Firefox the [default] browser...they're going to need to start bumping up the controls and security and the devices to protect that environment," said Robert Hansen, CEO of Web security consultancy SecTheory. How much the Postini and Green Border acquisitions will go to secure existing Google products is unclear. Google said Monday that it will enhance Gmail with Postini's technology, but Hansen thinks that it will take time before Google builds security into its products from the ground up. In the company's rush to deliver cool and compelling features to its users has come at the expense of security, he believes. And until there is some sort of widespread security problem -- such as the worm and virus outbreaks that shut down Windows users five years ago -- Google has little incentive to make security a priority within its existing products. "It comes down to the business case," Hansen said. "If I want to fix Blogspot I have to convince some product manager somewhere that it's worth doing the investment... and in the end users are going to hate it." James Niccolai in Paris contributed to this report. Â
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IBM yesterday announced plans to buy Consul Risk Management, a compliance and security software company with the bulk of its developers in Herndon -- the third local software firm bought in IBM's recent buying binge.
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IBM said it plans to acquire software vendor Systemcorp for an undisclosed sum. The Montreal company makes project portfolio management software for helping companies manage IT projects.
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IBM on Friday announced it acquired privately held Systems Research & Development (SRD), for an undisclosed amount, to fill out its business intelligence middleware portfolio.
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McAfee will pay $51 million to acquire ScanAlert, which runs a paid service that scans Web sites for security vulnerabilities.
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Security software maker announces plans to acquire Hacker Safe transaction certifier in a cash deal worth approximately $51 million.
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(InfoWorld) - EMC Corp. will spend US$175 million to acquire security information provider Network Intelligence Corp. The privately held Westwood, Massachusetts, company sells appliances that probe computer networks, providing security and compliance analysis. EMC's latest acquisition, expected to close late Monday, underscores the growing importance of security technology to the storage vendor. Also on Monday, EMC announced that it had completed its $2.1 billion purchase of RSA Security, which will form the basis of a new RSA-branded security division within the company. Former RSA CEO Art Coviello will head up this division, which will absorb the Network Intelligence business unit, EMC said in a statement. Founded in 1996, Network Intelligence has more than 125 employees, according to the company's Web site. With these latest acquisitions, EMC hopes to be able to sell security as part of a broader product portfolio, said Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president and chief executive officer. "It's becoming critical that security move beyond a point product solution," he said. Analysts say security companies will find it increasingly difficult to go it alone, with technology giants such as Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. moving quickly to add security features to their broader product platforms. Just last month, IBM said it would spend $1.3 billion to acquire managed security vendor Internet Security Systems (ISS).ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has launched a major upgrade of its WebSphere flagship middleware product, adding autonomic troubleshooting capabilities and other new features designed to improve performance in the application-server platform.
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OCTOBER 06, 2004  - IBM today unveiled a new version of its WebSphere Application Server software, which is designed to protect applications from server downtime and boost enterprise efforts to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.It is purchasing Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software, which helps ensure that business processes automated through software are in compliance with a company&#39;s rules and regulations.SAP characterized the deal, announced at its Tech Ed conference in Munich, Germany, on Wednesday, as a &quot;fill in&quot; acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The deal is due to close this month and financial terms were not disclosed.Several vendors, including SAP, are providing software tools that allow companies to automate common business processes, such as issuing a purchase order or checking inventory levels, with the goal of making them more efficient.But SAP does not yet offer tools for managing these processes, and buying Yasu will help it to add such BPM (business process management) capabilities to NetWeaver.SAP will begin pilot tests of its first BPM product, code-named Galaxy, in the first quarter of next year. The technology acquired from Yasu will be integrated with Galaxy around the middle of next year, said Klaus Kreplin, SAP&#39;s head of NetWeaver technology.Yasu&#39;s software helps companies to enforce the rules that their business processes must abide by. If a company automates a project approval process, for example, Yasu will send projects under a certain budget to a midlevel manager for approval, and more costly projects to a senior manager.&quot;The nice thing is, you can define rules and make them available as a service that can be integrated with other applications,&quot; Kreplin said.Yasu was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees. Customers include the automaker BMW, according to its Web site.BPM is one of several areas SAP is entering to compete better with its main applications rival, Oracle. SAP will also offer software for building composite applications, called the NetWeaver Composition Environment, and developing hosted applications for smaller companies, called SAP Business ByDesign.The Galaxy software will be integrated with NetWeaver Composition Environment next year. Eventually that, in turn, will be offered as a part of Business ByDesign, Kreplin said, although he wouldn&#39;t say when.Last week SAP said it would&#160;buy business intelligence vendor Business Objects&#160;for S$6.8 billion. A few days later&#160;Oracle offered to buy BEA Systems, whose software competes with SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, for $6.7 billion, but BEA called the offer too low.SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times of London over the weekend that SAP won&#39;t enter a bidding war for BEA, and that its strategy is still to grow its two core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically.But he wouldn&#39;t rule out further big acquisitions in areas where SAP is not already strong. &quot;We are categorically not excluding further big acquisitions,&quot; Kagermann said, according to the Financial Times.The company also continues to snap up smaller companies. SAP has bought more than a dozen vendors in the past three years, according to IDC, including five in 2005, three in 2006, and six so far in 2007, including Yasu and Business Objects. That compares to more than 30 acquisitions for Oracle, a few of which were much larger deals.
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IBM plans to acquire content-management software maker Venetica, the 18th acquisition that Big Blue&#39;s Software Group has made since 2001.
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IBM continued its data management-related acquisition streak Thursday by announcing plans to buy Venetica, a maker of content integration software.
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Motorola plans to acquire wireless mobile device developer Symbol Technologies for $3.9 billion, the companies announced Tuesday.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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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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International Business Machines Corp. on Thursday agreed to buy MRO Software Inc. for $740 million, giving IBM a niche provider of software and services to help customers including nuclear power plants and oil companies make the most efficient use of industrial assets.
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In a move likely to obstruct Oracle?s hostile take-over bid, PeopleSoft last week announced it will adopt IBM?s WebSphere as its preferred middleware platform.