HP Playing Security Catch-up

Not wanting to be left behind by rivals IBM, Novell Inc. and others in the security game, Hewlett-Packard Co. on Thursday announced that it has agreed to acquire TruLogica Inc., a small identity management vendor.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TruLogica, based in Dallas, is known in the industry for taking an innovative approach to the problem of identity management and user provisioning. The companys flagship product, Concero, uses a customers business as the model for granting user privileges and access rights, rather than relying on each users role to define their identity. The system is designed to simplify and automate the provisioning process.

HP plans to integrate TruLogicas technology into its OpenView Select Access product, company officials said. The company was intrigued by TruLogicas offerings because of their strong emphasis on self-service and automation, as well as support for a variety of industry standards, such as SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language) and XML, among others.

IBM, through its Tivoli Software division, and Novell both have established strong presences in the identity management market in the last two years, grabbing large portions of a sector that has been growing quickly of late. A host of smaller vendors, including Netegrity Inc., Oblix Inc., Passlogix Inc. and others, also have solid footholds in this space.

This leaves HP, based in Palo Alto, Calif., to play a bit of catch-up. The company began this process last year when it bought the SelectAccess business line from Baltimore Technologies plc., an Irish security company.

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