EMC sees the deal as giving the company the capability to apply security directly to information assets via RSA’s encryption, and identity-based protection technologies. This approach capitalizes well on RSA’s offerings, and can connect customers with direct business value from RSA’s assets, which were seen formerly by some as being technology-focused rather than business-oriented. However, it leaves a few questions in the air for EMC, despite the synergistic factors to the deal.
The first of these is whether EMC will act further to live up to its new slogan, which adds another word to its claim that EMC is where information lives securely. This looks like a vision that is not wholly fulfilled yet, in that some information assets (e.g. email) would fall outside the protection afforded by EMC’s newly expanded capabilities.
It will also be interesting to see whether EMC chooses to extend the reach that RSA had into the identity and access management (I&AM) market. A Butler Group report recently highlighted that RSA would need at least one more key element to field a complete, end-to-end solution set in this market area.
Its highly acquisitive new owner will surely evaluate the extra sales potential that could result from adding an important and complementary capability like provisioning, as well as the added credibility this would give to EMC’s ascent up the enterprise value chain. Depending on that consideration, Courion, as easily the strongest provisioning specialist still independent, might expect soon to be considering the possibility of getting even closer to its near neighbor from the Boston area.
Just as interesting as the questions now raised for EMC are those that Symantec must now be asking itself, in the wake of its competitor’s most recent acquisition announcement.
Symantec’s portfolio is laden with security offerings, but none that offer I&AM, and, although it does have email security products, it has no message equivalent to many of its competitors on the ‘information lifecycle’ front. To develop this would have seemed a natural course to take from the acquisition of Veritas, in order to ensure that Symantec satisfied customers’ needs higher in the information value chain.
I&AM is a capability that competitors like Oracle, CA, and IBM position centrally with middleware, application security, and enterprise management in general, and this could be seen as a significant gap in the Symantec armory.
Both EMC and Symantec are expected to address their respective opportunities to enhance and complete their portfolios in these areas soon, in order to meet a wider range of customers’ needs.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
