Rockville, Md. - Axent Technologies, Inc. today officially completed its merger with Waltham, Mass.-based Raptor Systems, Inc. in a stock swap of 12.8 million shares of Axent stock valued at about $245 million.
Under the agreement, Raptor, which sells the Eagle firewall and more recently, Raptor Access for centralized authentication of Web servers, will become a business unit of Axent Technologies, a security vendor that markets the OmniGuard line of products.
Axent's product line includes the Intruder Alert detection system, the Enterprise Resource Manager for centralized administration of security policy for one-time authentication to multiple computer resources, the Defender token authentication, and the Enterprise Access Control desktop encryption tool.
"The driving forces behind this merger are critical mass, product line synergies and expanded distribution channels," noted Axent President and CEO John Becker.
The two security vendors have virtually no product overlap but plenty of potential for product integration and cross-selling into each other's traditional customer base.
Raptor Axcess, for example, which shipped a few weeks ago, is software that lets security managers control access to multiple Web servers based on passwords, hardware tokens or X.509 certificates.
Raptor Axcess supports several different vendors' token I.D. products, including Axent's OmniGuard/Defender, but network managers still have to write some customized code for it all to work together, said Axcess product manager Tom Mulvehill.
"Yes, our engineers are already up at [Axent's] labs figuring out the integration for the Defender Authentication Server, the Enterprise Resource Manager and Axcess," said Lance Urbas, who was Raptor's senior vice president of engineering and technical services. With the merger completed today, Urbas becomes vice president and general manager of Axent's Raptor division.
Becker said among efforts to watch in the coming months will be integration of the Raptor firewall with Axent's Enterprise Resource Manager for central configuration control of the firewall.
Under the merger agreement, Raptor CEO Shaun McConnon will remain on board as a consultant and will join the reformed board of directors at Axent.
