McAfee to buy smartphone management vendor Trust Digital

So the enterprise "can 'yes' to the iPhone?'

By John Cox on Tue, 05/25/10 - 4:49pm.

Security vendor McAfee is strengthening its grip on enterprise smartphone security by buying Trust Digital.

The idea initially is to add Trust Digital's software for enterprise smartphone security and management to the McAfee-branded portfolio of business security offerings. Longer-term, McAfee will integrate parts of the Trust Digital code and intellectual property into an integrated offering, starting with McAfee's common management console, ePolicy Orchestrator.

A privately held company based in McLean, Virginia, Trust Digital has focused on adding to the often under-whelming smartphone platforms those security features that enterprise IT groups want in order to secure the devices and support their users in the field. TD's central management console can exploit whatever security and management the device has. But a TD agent downloaded to the device can add a range of much more advanced features, such as two-factor authentication.

That's why Mark Shull, CEO of Trust Digital, in a statement said that the merger "will enable IT to say yes to the iPhone and Android.” (Shull may have the shortest CEO tenure on record: he was appointed to that post only in April 2010.)

I think what he actually meant was "say yes to improved security on the iPhone and Android, which IT or their bosses have already said 'yes' to." But that doesn't trip off the tongue.

Trust Digital's product is Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), essentially a collection of applications, positioned in the DMZ, for securing and managing enterprise smartphones. Phones can download the EMM client, or in the case of the iPhone or other devices that support Microsoft Enterprise ActiveSynch, use the EMM Proxy, introduced in mid-2009.

The Proxy mimics the behavior of Microsoft Exchange Server and links to it, or any other backend mail server, like Lotus Notes, that supports ActiveSync. A Web-based management console gives network administrators a view of the hardware and software assets on each phone,a view that can be tailored for subgroups like security or help desk staff.

There are a lot of vendors in this space. Apart from the big boys like Microsoft and RIM, there are Sybase (Afaria), MobileIron, BoxTone which just announced the early release of its next generation platform, and Zenprise.

Strikingly, both Trust Digital and BoxTone use the exact same marketing metaphor to "distinguish" their strategies and products: "a single pain of glass." The idea is that their software layers over the diversity of multi-vendor mobile deployments, aggregates data and information from them, and represents them via a single set of management screens.

It's a nice thought.