CA to acquire DLP vendor Orchestria

News that CA has announced a definitive agreement to acquire
Orchestria quite brightened up my first day back at work following the
Christmas and New Year break. It also lends support to my increasing respect
for the energy and thinking I have picked up when speaking with people across
CA.

The Data Loss Prevention (DLP) market has seen some
interesting consolidations over the past 2 years as many large vendors purchased
DLP technologies to complete their strategic line up. What is just as
interesting is the few major players that have not plugged the DLP hole in
their portfolio and carry on in their own sweet way whilst others, such as CA,
steal a march on them. This problem will only get worse as the number of really
good independent DLP vendors available for purchase decreases.

The CA product line up had a DLP sized hole for a while, and
it makes sense for CA to purchase a respected player such as Orchestria. The
alternative, of developing a home grown solution, would be time consuming and
difficult. After all many of the fundamental issues of DLP have been fixed by
vendors such as Orchestria so why bother reinventing the wheel?

The Orchestria product will fit well as part of the CA identity
and access management (IAM) solution set and apparently CA will be looking at
creating industry-specific DLP policy sets for customers. Quite how this will
work in practice I don’t know, but it shows a desire to make DLP easy to buy
and provide a cross sell opportunity for the access management folks.

Orchestria will no doubt benefit from the increased bang
they will get as part of CA, who will undoubtedly push development for all they
can get to drive in new features. It will be interesting to see what will
become of the UK arm of Orchestria, especially the research and development site
based in Taunton, Somerset. Hopefully CA will see a way of keeping these
skilled engineers on board without flattening their energies.

Additionally Orchestria has a relationship with Symantec who
license the Orchestria Smart Tagging technology for use in their Enterprise
Vault product. They also have a partnership with Voltage providing integration
with the email encryption product Voltage SecureMail. Time will tell what happens
with these relationships post CA.

The data loss prevention market is starting to mature at a
rate of knots. CA has just dragged it out of its teenage years.