赛门铁克宣布了acquisitionsThursday of data encryption specialists PGP Corp. and GuardianEdge Technologies have industry watchers wondering which products will stay and go, and how开源PGP将在收购之后票价。
赛门铁克已经有几年的分析师令人费解，为什么公司只有许可而不是购买加密技术，而是今天举行了一个大胆的声明，以3.7亿美元的计划收购，以解决与监管要求相关的客户需求和不断增长的移动设备。用法。
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The acquisition of both companies, however, raises questions about which products and brands will survive. Symantec simply says at this point it will support products from both vendors into the future.
“桌面上的PGP肯定重叠，”指出了Gartner分析师John Pescatore。“我们的赌注是守护者在长远来看。”
He notes Symantec has cultivated a very close relationship with GuardianEdge, a favorite of the financial and government sectors, through OEM relationships and has integrated its technology into the Symantec Altiris management framework.付款卡业Pescatore说数据安全要求。
One strength of PGP is its server-side encryption and security offerings, which compete with products from vendors such as nuBridges, Voltage, Vormetrics and RSA with its BSafe toolkit. Demand is growing for server-side encryption because of the
Symantec says PGP counts 100,000 enterprise customers with more than 1,000 employees, and 1 million small-to-midsized customers with fewer than 1,000 employees.
赛门铁克表示，它认为PGP及其公钥加密技术将其作为利用关键管理的创新票。
Symantec is a market leader in the data loss prevention (DLP.) product arena, and "for complete use of DLP, encryption is an important part," Symantec CEO Enrique Salem told financial-industry analysts earlier this morning on a conference call to announce the acquisitions.
The PGP platform for key-management will contribute to Symantec's focus on creating a "policy-based approach" in security, Salem said. In addition, a start-up acquired by PGP, called ChosenSecurity, offers another path into identity management related to establishing trust among users and sites, he noted.
"We will standardize on the PGP key-management platform," says Francis deSouza, senior vice president, Enterprise Strategy group, Symantec.
PGP's key-management technology is expected to be used as a way to manage keys for GuardianEdge, as well, deSouza says. Symantec intends to support both thePGP和GuardianEdge产品线，虽然现实是产品重叠。PGP重点管理技术也有望在许多赛门铁克努力中发挥重要作用云计算和存储.
As far as maintaining the GuardianEdge and PGP names, deSouza indicated that PGP seems to have a particularly strong brand.
但赛门铁克将成为开源PGP的管家吗？
"We like open source," deSouza replied, but also noted the question of PGP open source is being reviewed. "We're evaluating it."
Pescatore说，他希望如果他们继续支持开放来源，他倾向于认为他们应该这样做，他们应该在SourceFire完成的精神中，而不是开源入侵检测，而不是什么适合的has done with the Nessus tool. It would backfire on Symantec "if they try to be heavy-handed or go after people," he noted.
Although both PGP and GuardianEdge are privately-held companies, there are those in the financial community that have had a peek into their numbers. PGP is about a $75 million a year company, says Joel Fishbein, software analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, and GuardianEdge is closer to $20 million.
在获得核心加密技术方面，“赛门铁克在这里玩了一点点追赶”，“鱼贝因说，迈克宾等竞争对手几年前购买了Safeboot，检查点购买了Pointsec，以及Sophos购买了Utimaco。
However, Jon Oltsik, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, thinks Symantec has done well with these deals and "Symantec got a lot more for less money."
While it's unclear if there was a bidding war over PGP, it is known that IBM is very close to the company.
Fishbein says he hopes Symantec, which has made large-scale acquisitions in the past, will focus on retaining "the intellectual capital of the companies," such as the core engineering talent, among other personnel. That's something he thinks has not always gone well for Symantec in the past, he says, and "that's the question mark."
就其部分而言，赛门铁克承认下一步是使其在将监护率和PGP带入赛门铁克时平滑过渡。GuardianEdge拥有80名员工，PGP有400名员工，并且期望大多数人将加入，但在大多数合并中，可能存在的重叠类型，这意味着并非所有员工最终最终才能结束。
赛门铁克的desouza表示，由于收购可能“在快速增长的加密市场中为我们提供了领先地位”，因此有强烈的目的感。
For those with a long memory, the bargaining and buying is full of some ironies in the go-go software industry.
The PGP Corp. acquisition by Symantec is but the latest chapter in the turbulent history of PGP, started by Phil Zimmermann in the early 1990s to commercialize his groundbreaking open-source encryption software, PGP being the acronym for what he called "Pretty Good Privacy." In 1997, PGP, Inc. was bought by Network Associates, which eventually lost interest in PGP technology, though ex-PGP people founded the new PGP Corp. in 2002 after buying assets from Network Associates.
Pescatore说，赛门铁克本身在桌面加密游戏中，即使也许是领导者，也许是一个名为YouseyeSonly的产品。该公司最终抛弃了，思考微软将接管其目标市场进行加密，即使没有发生。
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