Cisco To Acquire Securent

Cisco Systems has agreed to acquire Securent Inc., a provider of policy management software for businesses, for $100 million. Securent makes software that helps companies protect their data, communications and other applications. The company is based in Mountain View, Calif., and has 57 employees. The Securent team will be assimilated into Cisco's Collaboration Software Group. The deal, number 125 for Cisco, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2008. "As enterprises shift to service-oriented architectures and adopt technologies such as Unified Communications and Web 2.0 based collaboration, there is a rising need for control over access to distributed enterprise resources," Don Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group, said in a statement. "Securent's software offers enterprises a single point of control to define and manage entitlements across applications and data," he added. "This capability is well aligned with Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA), enabling policy decisions to be delivered as a network service across multiple applications, platforms, and delivery models."