Kaseya Acquires Scorpion Software

Four months after rebranding itself as an "IT management cloud company," Kaseya acquired a security company that will provide the foundation for a new identity management as a service (IDaaS) offering.

Kaseya on Tuesday announced the acquisition of Scorpion Software, a Chilliwack, British Columbia company that sells password solutions for two-factor authentication, single sign-on and password management.

"They have been very, very successful in selling to the same customers that Kaseya sells to -- managed service providers and midmarket IT," said Yogesh Gupta, Kaseya president and CEO, in a telephone interview. Scorpion has about 500 MSPs on its customer list, many of whom overlap with Kaseya MSPs.

"They are the most attractive solution for MSPs when it comes to identity and access management," Gupta said of Scorpion. Kaseya and several other remote monitoring and management tool vendors use Scorpion's APIs to integrate with that company's AuthAnvil-branded password solutions. Major PSA vendors ConnectWise and Autotask have also integrated with AuthAnvil.

Gupta vowed to continue to support open APIs. "We are very committed to continuing to support products from folks who are perceived as competitors of Kaseya. From our perspective, a customer is a customer," he said.

Kaseya plans to integrate AuthAnvil capabilities into its core product, Virtual System Administrator, in the next six to nine months, much as it integrated its three 2013 acquisitions -- Office 365 Command, Rover Apps and Zyrion.

However, Gupta has his eye on another market for the Scorpion products -- IDaaS, which analysts at Gartner have pointed to as a potentially hot area within the security sector.

"Even in this day and age, user IDs and passwords are the worst challenge when it comes to security.  Being able to have an identity and access management solution that leverages two-factor authentication makes it extremely easy to get to everything that people want to do," Gupta said.

Spearheading the effort for Kaseya will be Dana Epp, who founded Scorpion in 2003. Epp becomes principal architect for identity access management at Kaseya. Epp said AuthAnvil will become a cornerstone of what Kaseya will call the "Universal Directory."

Epp will focus initially on extending the Kaseya Universal Directory to help users manage their disparate log-ons to common cloud applications. Another area of effort will involve unifying the log-on experience to include more seamless access to devices.

"Today you have your identity as a user. But you probably have a phone and a tablet and a laptop. If I know this is your cellphone, and I know that you have already proven to have access to it, why do you have to provide another password on the phone? We'll be building that into the next-gen platform as we extend the application stack. AuthAnvil will be the cornerstone," said Epp, who is also a Microsoft MVP for enterprise security.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, and Gupta declined to say how many employees Scorpion Software has. "The entire team is coming over," Gupta said. "It's a relatively small team, but they've been growing very rapidly. The company revenues are doubling year over year."

Posted by Scott Bekker on August 12, 2014