Application security

Cisco acquires Securent for $100 million

Updated at 3:06 PM EST.


Cisco strengthened its rapidly expanding security portfolio with the acquisition on Thursday of Securent, maker of entitlement management solutions.

Those offerings enable organizations to maintain and enforce access policy across heterogeneous applications and collaboration software, according to a Cisco news release.

"As enterprises shift to service-oriented architectures and adopt technologies such as unified communications and Web 2.0-based collaboration, there is a rising need for control over access to distributed enterprise resources," said Don Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group. "Securent's software offers enterprises a single point of control to define and manage entitlements across applications and data."

Burton Group analyst Phil Schacter said Thursday in his blog that more organizations are grasping how entitlement management can standardize and extend policy to different applications. He said the acquisition will help Cisco fill a void in its service-oriented network architecture (SONA).

"Rather than this acquisition being the first move in a strategy for Cisco to become a major player in identity services, it is more likely to take a rising star out of the identity market to be subsumed within a network and collaboration mega-vendor," he said.

Fifty-seven-employee Securent, based in Mountain View, Calf., recently released guidelines aimed at multi-office organizations who want to centralize control and visibility of entitlement management across their applications.

This is the third security-specific acquisition Cisco has made this year. In January, the networking giant acquired email security firm IronPort and in May, it picked up BroadWare Technologies, maker of IP-based video surveillance technology.

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