CA giving it the big 'IAM'
CA has made bold claims about its intention to dominate the identity and access management (IAM) space as the market for such technologies appears poised for a boom-time.
John Swainson, CEO of CA, said he has earmarked IAM for special attention above and beyond all other areas of the company's security division but the unit's head assured silicon.com this is due to the prevailing market opportunity and not because they are turning down the heat under other security lines.
Ron Moritz, SVP eTrust security solutions, told silicon.com that until now "IAM has been a laggard in terms of interest".
But he said that trend is definitely shifting. His claims are supported by the noise other vendors are making in this space and the value banks and businesses are starting to see in technologies such as two-factor authentication and solutions such as federation.
Moritz said: "Where people have typically spent are in the more glamorous areas such as antivirus, hackers, spyware and spam but threats such as phishing and pharming and the importance of identity due to regulation and compliance means this is where people are going to be spending money now."
At the heart of CA's IAM strategy is its US$430 million purchase of Netegrity which is now bearing its first fruit with the launch of CA Identity Manager this week at CA World. The new product pulls together existing offerings from both CA and Netegrity in the IAM space.
Swainson told silicon.com his decision to focus on IAM is unrelated to Symantec's insistence that this is one area it will not be flexing its considerable muscles.
He said: "Symantec can do what it likes."
However, CA ruled out moves away from its software roots into other emerging areas of the market such as managed security services or security appliances.
Speaking at CA World in Las Vegas this week, Yogesh Gupta, CTO of CA, said: "I think in some ways doing services over the web is the way the world is going to go for certain services."
He said: "We definitely see that as an opportunity but at the moment I don't see us going down the hosting route," adding CA already has partnerships in place with service providers such as AOL, RoadRunner and Yahoo! who provide its eTrust security products for their own customers.
Moritz told silicon.com CA now provides its security products to nine out of the top 16 ISPs in the US as a white label OEM, "so people using security products provided by AOL won't necessarily know it is a CA product".
He said he expects to see more banks going down this OEM route as well. Lloyds TSB recently launched a scheme to provide online security tools for its customers.