WOW, it has been a very busy quarter for Data at Rest companies in the marketplace. Almost all of the existing players in the market have been purchased by large acquirers, including the recent acquisition of Guardian Edge (once PC Guardian) and PGP by Symantec.
Almost every viable player in the market has now been acquired, and I expect the rest to follow suit in the next quarter. For those of you that have not been following over the years - here is the plays that have been made:
First to go, (my former employer) Pointsec Mobile Technologies was sold to Checkpoint for 586M .
Then Utimaco was purchased by Sophos for 342M .
The McAfee purchased the former SafeBoot product for 350M .
Now Symantec has taken down both PGP for 300M and Guardian Edge for 70M .
Over my more than a decade in the Data-at-Rest business it has gone from ‘what is encrpytion’ to ‘whose security suite with encryption are you buying’. This technology has strongly moved into the mainstream.
It should not be a surprise as Information Security regulations have grown in include a number of requirements for protection of personally identifiable information - both all major commercial vertical and government agencies.
The question for 2010 and 2011 will be one of large scale implementation of the technologies usign existing tools on the market, as well as growth of those products as they are integrated into much large suites of applications.
I think that we will see a few more acquisition firework shows before it is done, but I’m looking forward to seeing the resulting mainstream products that result.