Quest acquisition is strong IAM move

The foundation for security and enterprise management

The East Coast of North America is going through an unprecedented heat wave, but here on the West Coast it still feels like spring. Adding to that feeling, for me, is the number of announcements that major vendors are making --such as the two big ones in the past week.

First, in a blockbuster deal, Quest announced it will acquire the German Völcker Informatik AG with its ActiveEntry product, a leading-edge identity provisioning solution with some integrated Access Governance capabilities. Leading European Analyst Martin Kuppinger said that this "…brings Quest into a leading position in the overall IAM market. Until now, Quest has been a provider of several point solutions around IAM issues. They had some provisioning capabilities in their ActiveRoles Server before -- but it hasn’t been the technical leading-edge product but more an add-on for some provisioning for Active Directory and a little beyond."

Tech M&A deals of 2010

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The East Coast of North America is going through an unprecedented heat wave, but here on the West Coast it still feels like spring. Adding to that feeling, for me, is the number of announcements that major vendors are making --such as the two big ones in the past week.

First, in a blockbuster deal, Quest announced it will acquire the German Völcker Informatik AG with its ActiveEntry product, a leading-edge identity provisioning solution with some integrated Access Governance capabilities. Leading European Analyst Martin Kuppinger said that this "…brings Quest into a leading position in the overall IAM market. Until now, Quest has been a provider of several point solutions around IAM issues. They had some provisioning capabilities in their ActiveRoles Server before -- but it hasn’t been the technical leading-edge product but more an add-on for some provisioning for Active Directory and a little beyond."

Tech M&A deals of 2010

The infamous Gartner Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning shows Völcker in the "niche" quadrant for 2006 and 2007, moving up to the "visionaries" quadrant for 2008 and 2009. Gartner analyst Earl Perkins said that the company moves "…up in its ability to execute due to its expanded partnership efforts, continued innovation in feature sets…and improved integration with Microsoft infrastructure." The company gets dinged on marketing ability and user training, two areas that Quest excels in

For Quest, it's a chance to provide a much more complete IAM solution, something that's been a bone of contention for the company even as they provided a robust panoply of identity and security utilities with, perhaps, the largest collection of tools for Microsoft's identity products.

This looks to be a very comfortable fit that should be good for existing clients of both companies as well as those looking to replace one complete solution (e.g., Sun IAM customers) with another.

After last issue's look at a potential merger of user-centric and enterprise-centric identity products (see here), I was interested to read a blog post ("Using Consumer Identities for Business Interactions,") from Microsoft's Mike Jones. You should read it also.

Next issue we'll look at a new entry in regulatory compliance from an old friend in the IAM business -- stay tuned!

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

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.