Cisco to buy policy management vendor for US$100 million

Cisco this week announced an agreement to acquire Securent, a provider of policy management software for enterprises, for US$100 million. Securent is privately held and based in California. The company's distributed policy platform lets enterprises administer, enforce, and audit access to data, communications, and applications in heterogeneous IT application environments, Cisco says.

Securent's software will enable Cisco customers to protect application data regardless of vendor, platform, or operating system while still allowing access to content that workers need, Cisco says. Establishing and enforcing entitlement at the network level is consistent with Cisco's Services Oriented Network Architecture (SONA), which lets policy decisions be delivered as a network service across applications, platforms and delivery models, the company says.

Securent has 57 employees and development operations in Hyderabad, India. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $100 million in cash and assumed options. Cisco says the acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2008. After the acquisition closes, the Securent team and technology will become part of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group, led by Senior Vice President Don Proctor.

This will be acquisition No. 125 for Cisco.