IBM Bolsters Security Wares With Lighthouse, Crossideas Acquisitions

August 18, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With a few notable exceptions, IBM does not like to make big bang acquisitions. Rather, the company prefers to buy smaller companies that are onto a niche and are poised to grow and could use the help of Big Blue’s 140-country reach and massive salesforce and partner channel. The company has made two such small acquisitions in the security field in recent weeks.

At the end of July, IBM bought a small security software company based in Rome, Italy called Crossideas, which was founded in 2011 and which sells a suite of identity management software called Ideas. The Ideas software includes access management and as well as risk analysis, reporting for compliance, and connectors to popular databases, middleware, and application suites. The Ideas tools used to be part of a company called Engiweb Security, which was founded in 2001, and the team working on identity management software did a buyout to found Crossideas. The company had 90 customers in the banking, manufacturing, energy, and government sectors, with its largest customers managing over 100,000 users and millions of access points across their applications. Earlier this year, Crossideas had integrated the Ideas tools with IBM’s own Security Identity Manager, and it looks like Big Blue just figured it might as well own the company and figure out how to build a better, single product.

Last week, IBM bought “the business operations” of long-time security partner Lighthouse Computer Services, and specifically to get control of Lighthouse Gateway, a cloud-based identity and access management tool that is in turn based in part of a suite of IBM security products that bear the Tivoli brand. Basically, IBM bought a privately held Tivoli security as a service firm.

Financial details of both acquisitions were not divulged by IBM.

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