CA to buy ID management vendor Eurekify

Acquisition will broaden CA's role-based access and identity management product line

CA Thursday announced it had inked a deal to acquire role-based access and identity management vendor Eurekify for an undisclosed sum. (Watch a slideshow of the hottest M&As of 2008.) 

The acquisition, expected to close by the end of the month, brings Eurekify's technology further into the CA fold, which could enable CA to more tightly integrate the vendor's products with its own. CA partnered in May with Eurekify to complement its Identity Manager software with automated role provisioning and identity life-cycle management capabilities. At the time CA was reselling Eurekify Enterprise Role Manager, but industry watchers speculated the partnership could develop into an acquisition. The addition of this type of automation in CA's identity management arsenal will help customers reduce costs and improve outdated processes around identities to meet current compliance and security requirements, analysts said. (Compare identity management products)  

"One of the biggest and most expensive aspects of enterprise-class identity management is defining roles and assigning access," said Scott Crawford, research director with Enterprise Management Associates, in a June interview with Network World. "Taking the role-based approach Eurekify offers streamlines that process, automates defining roles in a large end-user population and makes auditors happy because with fewer, more well-defined roles, access is more accurate, meaning fewer chances for unauthorized access."

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CA Thursday announced it had inked a deal to acquire role-based access and identity management vendor Eurekify for an undisclosed sum. (Watch a slideshow of the hottest M&As of 2008.) 

The acquisition, expected to close by the end of the month, brings Eurekify's technology further into the CA fold, which could enable CA to more tightly integrate the vendor's products with its own. CA partnered in May with Eurekify to complement its Identity Manager software with automated role provisioning and identity life-cycle management capabilities. At the time CA was reselling Eurekify Enterprise Role Manager, but industry watchers speculated the partnership could develop into an acquisition. The addition of this type of automation in CA's identity management arsenal will help customers reduce costs and improve outdated processes around identities to meet current compliance and security requirements, analysts said. (Compare identity management products)  

"One of the biggest and most expensive aspects of enterprise-class identity management is defining roles and assigning access," said Scott Crawford, research director with Enterprise Management Associates, in a June interview with Network World. "Taking the role-based approach Eurekify offers streamlines that process, automates defining roles in a large end-user population and makes auditors happy because with fewer, more well-defined roles, access is more accurate, meaning fewer chances for unauthorized access."

(View a slideshow on the hottest tech M&A deals of 2008.)

Role-based access management represents the next wave of identity management, industry watchers say, in which fine-grained controls enable companies to better secure environments without necessarily limiting user productivity.

"It's a young area and there is not a lot of agreement over which vendors or products belong in which market segment," according to Burton Group research. "There is a bit of frenzy around entitlement management because it can help with security and compliance audits, but mostly it is a great opportunity to centralize application access management and put more controls in place to reduce enterprise risk, while still making necessary resources available."

CA said in a press release that the combination of CA Identity Manager with Eurekify Enterprise Role Manager enables customers to "clean up existing identity data and build a role model with the best available information." The Eurekify acquisition comes on the heels of CA's October buy of IDFocus, a company that developed software to control who can get access to corporate IT resources.

"These acquisitions, along with our organically developed products, ensure CA's continued strength in the growing security market," said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CA Security Management, in a statement.

CA, which is prepping for its CA World 2008 conference next week, says it will integrate Eurekify's Ra'anana, Israel-based operations into its CA's operations.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.