Cisco and IBM to Tackle Security Together

Recently, Cisco and IBM announced plans to collaborate on information security. The intent is to integrate their various respective tools and capabilities to deliver a degree of effectiveness and efficiency otherwise unachievable with disparate point products. We note that this effort exhibits the following positive characteristics: 1) it extends a long-standing strategic alliance of two industry heavyweights; 2) it involves highly complementary products and capabilities (with Cisco’s strengths in network infrastructure, isolation services, and intrusion protection, and IBM’s strengths in systems and application infrastructure, identity management, and services); and 3) it is being quickly validated with near-term integration in several areas, such as user provisioning, endpoint security, and policy compliance.

Bottom Line: The near-term integration points between Cisco and IBM deserve consideration, as they provide some useful foundational capabilities. More strategic gains will depend on further/deeper joint efforts, which we believe have the potential to raise the bar in terms of automation and security effectiveness.

META Group originally published this article on 24 February 2004.