The data loss prevention market consolidated just a little bit more yesterday with the announcement that Chicago-based Trustwave will purchase Vericept, a Denver-based company specializing in DLP.

Known best by channel partners for its wide range of managed services and compliance consulting, Trustwave says it picked up Vericept for the patented Content Analysis Engine running its DLP solution, which Gartner ranked in the Visionaries Quadrant in June. The acquisition will bolster Trustwave’s position within the PCI DSS compliance market, as Trustwave believes DLP can help satisfy seven of the 12 security requirements laid out by PCI.

"We're very excited to offer our customers a leading DLP solution that can manage sensitive data, scale to meet expanding business requirements and maintain high performance as business continues in real time," says Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO of Trustwave. "Vericept's DLP technology complements our current portfolio of security solutions offered to our global customer base."

This is Trustwave’s second large acquisition in 2009. In February the company acquired Mirage Networks, a leading network access control (NAC) vendor.

The deal is indicative of the continuing M&A activity within the DLP market as larger players look to integrate the technology into their more wide-scale security offerings, a trend that Gartner predicted will carry on for the coming years in its Magic Quadrant for Content Aware Data Loss Prevention, published in June. At that time, Gartner analysts actually predicted a Vericept deal sometime in the near future due to its inability to execute within a tough economic climate.

“Many vendors of products unrelated to DLP are embedding content-aware DLP technologies in their suite offerings,” wrote report authors Eric Oulett and Paul Proctor. “One indication of this trend is a significant amount of merger and acquisition activity and other consolidation in this market, which Gartner expects to continue.”

The Trustwave acquisition will mark the ninth major DLP acquisition since 2006, the last big deals being last year’s purchases of Orchestria by CA and Reconnex by McAfee. According to Proctor and Oulett, DLP doesn’t have long to go before it is expected to commoditize. They believe the market will see 50 percent reductions in price by 2011.