Novell Scoops Up e-Security

Looking to improve its competitive position in security and compliance management, Novell Wednesday bought software maker e-Security in a deal worth $72 million.

E-Security's Sentinel product gives IT administrators a single view of all security and compliance activities across the breadth of their enterprises. Novell officials said they plan to package their existing identity and management products with e-Security's real-time event-monitoring and reporting offerings later this spring.

"To me, it seems impossible to get a big-picture view of what is happening across the enterprise, and so this acquisition is about addressing that problem. When users get a comprehensive view of all network events across the network, they can better streamline security- and compliance-monitoring as well as cut costs through automation and build more predictable compliance programs," says Jack Messman, Novell's chairman and CEO at Novell.

Messman says the deal brings three key elements to Novell's capabilities including: the ability to monitor events in real-time across an enterprise; the resources to deliver and automate responses to many noncompliant activities; and the ability to audit and report on network events, such as access attempts for the purposes of compliance tracking.

Officials from both companies said the channel will play a key role in their strategies involving the combined offerings, particularly in the area of identity and access management.

"We intend to provide some pretty aggressive pricing and packaging alternatives for the channel that they can take directly to their customers. We also hope to create more services opportunities around our security- and access-management offerings and now the event-management offerings," says John Dragoon, vice president of marketing at Novell.

Asked how long Novell had been negotiating the deal, and if its timing had any relationship to recent published reports that Oracle had approached Novell about buying it, Messman says it had no bearing.

"Absolutely not. We were working on this deal [with e-Security] for some time, and it just happened to get done today," Messman says.

Asked later in the press conference how serious acquisition talks with Oracle had been, Messman declined to give specifics. He did add however, that in light of the recent acquisition of JBoss by archrival Red Hat, that Novell would be staying close to Oracle in the future.

Some analysts said the e-Security deal makes sense for Novell given that there is growing demand among users for converged solutions that take in identity, access and security-event management.

"With this deal, I believe Novell is now the only vendor with at least the potential to proactively address business needs for a real-time compliance solution that integrates people, systems and processes," says Chris Christiansen, vice president of security products and services at IDC.

E-Security's Sentinel 5 product will be available in May from Novell with the next version of Novell and e-Security solution expected sometime this summer, officials from both companies say.