Sun to acquire Waveset Technologies

Sun Tuesday announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Austin, Texas-based identity management software vendor Waveset Technologies for an undisclosed price.

Steve Pelletier, vice president of network identity management, communication and portal products at Sun, said Waveset’s Lighthouse suite of products has some capabilities, such as user provisioning, not found in Sun’s own identity management software. After the acquisition of Waveset becomes final, which is expected to occur by year-end, Sun intends to integrate some portion of Waveset’s software suite into Sun’s portal server and identity management products.

“Until we have the transaction closed, we’re limited to the amount of planning we can do before that,” Pelletier said, adding, “One of the key initiatives for us in software is identity management.”

Both Pelletier and Kevin Cunningham, vice president of marketing at Waveset, said there are no plans to phase out support for Waveset’s Lighthouse suite, which includes Provisioning Manager, Password Manager, Identity Broker and Directory Master.

Waveset now has about 50 customers, including 7-Eleven, Circuit City, Kraft Foods, Merrill Lynch and the U.S. Department of Defense. These would become Sun customers once the acquisition is complete. The 100 Waveset employees would remain in Austin, but since Sun has offices there as well, there could be a merger of office space between the two companies. Sun has no plans to lay off Waveset employees, said Pelletier.

In addition, neither Sun nor Waveset anticipates that their merger would adversely affect any of the many alliances that Waveset, as a small privately held company with a focus on identity management, has built up over the years.

Waveset has forged alliances with customer relationship management product vendors as well as Web portals and access-control software vendors to ensure product compatibility. For instance, Waveset has marketing and technology agreements with PeopleSoft and Entrust, but Sun and Waveset anticipated no changes in that regard.