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Netegrity customers should ‘plan exit strategy’ after CA buyout

Computer Associates' (CA's) planned acquisition of Netegrity is likely to help existing CA customers, but Netegrity customers should be "especially concerned" and plan an "exit strategy", industry analysts have warned.

A newly published briefing paper written by Gartner analysts Ant Allan, Roberta Witty, Ray Wagner and John Enck concluded that CA's acquisition announcement made on 6 October 2004 was not good news for Netegrity customers.

"CA's track record with acquisitions does not bode well for Netegrity's product set remaining independent," the report warned.

Customers of Netegrity, an identity access management (IAM), extranet access management (EAM) and user-provisioning software vendor, should begin assessing their purchasing strategy in the wake of the announcement, Gartner advised.

"CA's Netegrity acquisition may be troubling for IAM and EAM users and potential users, as well as Netegrity customers," Gartner's analysis stated.

"CA is not traditionally strong with IAM buyers who are not already CA customers."

The analyst firm advised CA eTrust users should welcome further enhancements to CA's IAM offering while Netegrity's existing and prospective customers should "monitor the acquisition's progress closely and develop contingency plans for an exit strategy".


Gartner added that it does not believe that the move toward suite functionality will hurt the market for independent IAM vendors as the choice of IAM tools has been limited for companies that do not want to work with a large "stack" vendor like CA.

"Vendors like RSA Security, Entrust, Courion, M-Tech, Oblix, and OpenNetwork Technologies have the most to gain here, especially if the acquisition process weakens Netegrity's market execution. Furthermore, we expect CA to integrate Netegrity's solutions into its own stack. This will allow smaller vendors to compete more effectively against CA than they could against Netegrity alone," Gartner stated.

CA already offers an eTrust IAM suite that includes both EAM and user provisioning tools: eTrust Web Access Control and eTrust Admin, the study noted: "CA has gone a long way to integrate these tools in a common infrastructure. Bringing Netegrity's Identity Minder into this infrastructure will likely create problems with CA's road map as CA decides which technologies to keep. Clearly it cannot keep them all."


www.gartner.com


 

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