HP acquires Trustgenix: no great surprise
HP today
announced the acquisition of Trustgenix Inc, continuing both its own recent acquisition spree (following those of
AppIQ,
Peregrine, and
RLX) and the consolidation in the identity management market (following Oracle's
recent acquisitions of OctetString and Thor Technologies).
This is hardly a shock. HP already OEM's Trustgenix' IdentityBridge, which it rebrands Select Federation, to provide federated identity management within HP's OpenView Identity Management Suite. And, whilst Trustgenix is certainly one of the leading specialist providers of federated identity management solutions, it seems unlikely given the land grab that is being made by the leading infrastructure and management vendors, that even a highly capable pure-play vendor could survive as an independent.
The press release left me with a couple of questions but we were sadly not privy to a briefing to ask any questions.
HP states
"Upon the closing of the acquisition, HP plans to integrate Trustgenix and its software solutions into the HP OpenView management software portfolio. The acquisition will allow HP to rapidly extend the federation capabilities of HP OpenView, enabling enterprise customers to help their business partners secure access to information residing on different systems." Now, as far as I can tell, IdentityBridge is already integrated into the HP software portfolio and offers federation capabilities, so I am at a loss to tell what additional value this will bring to customers. Rather, it seems to me that this is primarily a defensive move, to prevent someone else from snapping up Trustgenix - both Entrust and CA (through its acquisition of Netegrity) are also strategic partners. Which leads me to the second question: where does this leave those partnerhips?
One thing that this does bring to HP, which it chose not to mention in the press release, is the fact that TrustGenix has a specialised Carrier Edition of Identity Bridge which is targeted at wireless operators. This is obviously an important vertical market for HP with it's specialised telecoms software offerings, such as its
OpenCall and
Service Delivery Platform.
So, all in all, nothing terribly surprising and nothing, at least on my initial reading, that is going to have a significant impact on identity management market. HP does gain control of an important element of its identity management offerings and potentially bolsters its offerings in a key vertical market.
