Microsoft finalizes acquisition of VPN vendor Whale

Microsoft has finalized its purchase of SSL VPN vendor Whale Communications, a deal Microsoft hopes will be viewed not only for its remote access potential but also its ability to improve application performance over VPN links.

Along with announcing that the deal is closed, the company says it will cut the price of Whale gear and some of its supplemental software by 25% through the end of the year.

It also promises to continue integrating Whale software with its ISA Server firewall, caching and authentication server, with ISA Server 2006 integration coming later this year and with the ISA Server upgrade planned for late next year.

The company also says it will continue to support the application optimization software modules developed by Whale that makes it simpler to configure the applications to work over the SSL VPN. These optimizers take into account whether an application requires a persistent connection or polls a server periodically, for example, so these factors don't have to be configured by hand.

Microsoft's interest in Whale demonstrates a divergence taking place among SSL VPN vendors, says Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester Research. Some - such as Cisco, Juniper and Nortel - push the technology as a means of remote access and tout their network-layer agents as a way to give access to non-Web applications, he says.

Others - Citrix, F5 and now Microsoft - approach the problem as a way to give controlled access to applications with a focus on application performance. So they blend SSL VPN access with load balancing, caching, application firewalls to protect the application while making it work reliably in a Web environment, Whitely says.

More broadly, Microsoft integrating SSL VPN software in ISA Server may accelerate acceptance of SSL VPNs by businesses, he says. Most SSL products sold are appliances, and that is because most SSL gear is bought by networking IT professionals not server- and application-infrastructure IT professionals.

"SSL VPN software-only has failed, really," he says. "Microsoft doesn't sell to the network [hardware] people. They will bring SSL VPNs to an entirely fresh audience."