Cisco agreed to acquire Securent, a start-up offering policy management software for enterprises, for approximately $100 million in cash and assumed options.
Securent, which is based in Mountain View, California with development offices in Hyderabad, offers an Entitlement Management Solution (EMS), an XACML standard-based solution that allows organizations to create, enforce, review, and audit fine-grained access policies across heterogeneous application and IT environments distributed throughout the enterprise, all with centralized management and visibility.
Cisco said Securent's software will enable its customers to protect and secure valuable application data regardless of vendor, platform, or operating system while still allowing ubiquitous access to the content workers and their collaborative communities need to be productive. By delivering policy from the network, Cisco will simplify entitlement decisions for all communications, collaboration and other third party applications.
"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, Cisco's Collaboration Software Group.
http://www.cisco.com
http://www.securent.com
- Securent was founded in 2004 and is backed by funding from Greylock Partners and ONSET Ventures. The company has 57 employees.
- Securent is headed by Rajiv Gupta, who previously was the Founder and CEO of Confluent Software, where he led efforts for the successful development and growth of its policy-based web-services management product, before Confluent was acquired by Oblix in 2004. Before founding Confluent, Gupta spent 11 years at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as the General Manager of the E-speak Division.
- Cisco's 2007 acquisitions include: Securent, Navini Networks, Latigent, Cognio, Reactivity, Broadware, Spanslogic, WebEx, NeoPath Networks, Five Across, and IronPort Systems.
