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EMC Buys Archer Technologies for RSA

EMC channel partners will gain a new portfolio of IT governance, risk and compliance products to sell by the end of the first quarter after the company makes good on plans to acquire the GRC firm Archer Technologies. EMC’s RSA Security Division announced yesterday its plans to acquire Archer in order to bolster its ability […]

Written By

Ericka Chickowski

Jan 5, 2010

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EMC channel partners will gain a new
portfolio of IT governance, risk and compliance products to sell by the end of
the first quarter after the company makes good on plans to acquire the GRC
firm Archer Technologies.

EMC’s RSA
Security Division announced yesterday its plans to acquire Archer in order to
bolster its ability to offer solutions that enable customers to visualize and
manage risk, as well as automate policy enforcement and reporting of security
controls across physical and virtualized IT environments.

“Traditional security management focuses primarily on addressing technology
issues, but our customers are telling us that their real challenges are in the
areas of policy management, audit and compliance,” Art Coviello, president, RSA,
The Security Division of EMC, said in a
statement about the reason RSA targeted
Archer.

Based in Overland Park, Kan.,
Archer currently supports a base of 6 million licensed users and a strong
roster of clients that includes 25 of the Fortune 100. The engine behind its
product portfolio is the Archer SmartSuite Framework, which can be deployed
on-premises or through SaaS (software as a service).

RSA executives say that the suite of
products built on top of the product, including Policy, Risk, Compliance,
Enterprise, Incident, Vendor, Threat, Business Continuity and Audit Management,
complements RSA’s existing data loss
prevention (DLP) and security information
and event management (SIEM) products, as well as the EMC
Ionix configuration management and compliance products.

The company hopes to fold Archer’s GRC
capabilities into the EMC ecosystem to offer
end-to-end visibility and reporting about information movement and
infrastructure configuration.

“With Archer, we can also make information security a more integrated element
of overall IT-GRC efforts,” Coviello said.
“We can help customers unify their visibility and processes across security,
business continuity, configuration management and a range of broader IT
compliance tasks.”

EMC did not disclose the terms of the
acquisition of Archer, which is privately held. The deal is expected to close
by the end of the quarter. RSA will run
Archer as its own business unit, and executives say that it will leverage
Archer technology through its EMC Consulting
business through EMC Global Services, as
well as offering the products through EMC’s
partner ecosystem. This will be the first major availability of Archer through
the channel, as the company itself did not have a concrete channel program.

“Putting the resources of EMC and its RSA
Security Division behind us will bring tremendous leverage to our technology
development, customer support, partner ecosystem and go-to-market
capabilities,” Jon Darbyshire, CEO of Archer
Technologies, said in a statement. “We are in 25 percent of the Fortune 100
companies today, but EMC’s customers include
nearly 100 percent of them. With EMC’s
global reach, we will gain the scale we need to expand our market penetration
while continuing our strong tradition of customer-driven innovation.”

EMC Buys Archer Technologies for RSA

Ericka Chickowski

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