PatchLink Corporation to Acquire SecureWave – A Marriage Made in Heaven?

What do you do when you are a successful IT security company with a ravenous appetite for growth and you have just digested a recent acquisition?

Why, go buy another company of course.

So it was with great fanfare that PatchLink Corporation announced its acquisition of SecureWave in an all stock merger announced on 18th June.

PatchLink have been moving away from their patch-centric lifestyle in recent months as they acquired Harris STAT and started to position themselves into the corporate governance and risk management field—far more sexy than getting bogged down with patch management which only seems to appeal to a small minority of IT technicians.

Now with the added weight of SecureWave to add to the mix, PatchLink are starting to build credible momentum behind their strategy, and at the least are putting their money where their corporate hopes are.

SecureWave have created a lot of respect in the market place over the years with their policy-based device and application control systems. By using a white list approach they can lock down PCs so that only approved applications can be launched and devices run, no doubt to the huge frustration of users that wanted to play with their corporate PC. This is a great tool for the IT department as they can configure a PC and then leave it in the hands of a user knowing that it will always be “compliant”.

Will this be a marriage made in heaven? I don’t know, but I am sure the intended will give it a good go. The people at PatchLink seem to have the financial backing for such ventures, which is the easy bit. The challenge comes when technologies need to be integrated and egos satisfied. My view is that the more ventures like this that are successful the better, as it gives us all a choice of decent compliance platforms to build our businesses on.