Today Symantec announced that it is acquiring PGP. I certainly hope they treat the Mac PGP client better than they’ve treated some of their other Mac clients. This move brings Symantec squarely into the encryption space. They encrypt full disks (including the boot volume of Mac OS X), portables, file servers, jump drives, Blackberry and PDFs. They have a mature centralized key management solution (after all, all encryptions seems to be key based these days) and even recently added application control to their portfolio, to block malware. Perhaps the last is why Symantec went ahead and picked them up. Or perhaps it’s because they just like buying things at Symantec. Shiny IT things that do something cool… Well, this is perhaps one of my favorite companies that they’ve bought.
I’ve liked the PGP brand since watching Zimmerman fight to keep PGP going in the early 1990s, when PGP met the standards of a non-exportable weapon. That is, until Zimmerman published a physical book with the source code in OCR-friendly font and ended up with PGP covered under the first ammendment. All of that is such old history though. Zimmerman has been gone since 2001, after a merger and then an acquisition by Network Associates. The company then ended up getting dumped by Network Associates and refounded (with assets bought back from Network Associates) with a little VC. It’s been a weird journey to get to where they are today. I hate to watch it go away (again) as a company though. Hopefully this acquisition will go better than things went when they were part of Network Associates.
Symantec is also acquiring GuardianEdge. GuardianEdge products already integrate nicely alongside the Symantec portfolio. You can even deploy GuardianEdge with a special Altiris Connector into Altiris Notification Server, which alerts you when systems “present risk to protected information”. Overall, either PGP or GuardianEdge seem like great adds to the Symantec lineup. Both from the outside seem a bit superfluous but I have to guess someone has a great strategy for integrating the two brands into one. I look forward to watching it unfold.