Flexera Buys Secunia, Combining SAM and Vulnerability Management
Flexera Software is betting that software asset management (SAM) and software vulnerability management are a natural fit.
The Itasca, Ill.-based vendor of software licensing, compliance and installation solutions this week bought Secunia, a software vulnerability management solution provider well-known for its state-of-the-industry reports about vulnerabilities in different products.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but the 100-employee, Copenhagen-based Secunia is now part of Flexera, which is privately owned and had roughly 650 employees prior to the acquisition.
In an interview, Flexera CEO Mark Bishof said customers and analysts have been pushing the company to add security vulnerability to its core SAM capabilities, which the company calls Software License Optimization.
"While we're discovering all the software hardware and firmware out there, a lot of our customers have been asking us, 'Hey, wouldn't it be a good idea, since security vulnerabilities happen at the application level, to discover which applications are vulnerable?'" Bishof said.
"When you look at how our enterprise customers are typically organized, the software asset management group and the security group are normally separated. Whoever brings that information together in a digestible, usable framework can be a game changer," he said.
The companies already share some channel partners, who bring the two capabilities together for customers. "There's overlapping partners, but we don't have any overlapping technology. It's nice and clean. That's one of the reasons they sold to us as opposed to others that had security patching technologies," Bishof said.
The Flexera and Secunia products will continue to be sold separately, but the company also plans to integrate Secunia capabilities into the Flexera Software License Optimization platform.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 16, 2015 at 12:21 PM