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We Hardly Knew Ye
10 companies or markets that succumbed to consolidation.


Some companies vanish without a trace; others leave their mark on a product line long after corporate entities are gone; still others maintain an identity within a new parent company. We recall 10 of the many information security companies, in some cases groups of companies, that in large part defined their markets and have come and gone:

@stake Symantec's acquisition of @stake for its professional services and talent sent shivers through the service provider's customers. Symantec seized the SmartRisk analyzer service, whose effectiveness at finding and closing network vulnerabilities drew raves from customers.

Baltimore Technologies Remember the Year of PKI? You should, because there were several. Ireland's Baltimore was one of the big names in the often rocky PKI market, but failed to endure where competitors like Entrust, RSA and VeriSign thrived. Baltimore succumbed in 2004, bought out by beTrusted at a fraction of the valuation it enjoyed at the height of the dot-com boom.

BindView A leader in risk management, its products have been integrated into the Symantec portfolio.

Brightmail The popular email security service provider is now the backbone of Symantec's services and

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products.

Lost Identity Netegrity, one of a handful of Web access control vendors, was snapped up by CA, while competitor Oblix was acquired by Oracle, as those heavyweights sought to compete with RSA Security and IBM in the increasingly important Web identity management market.

Okena/Entercept These companies may have been ahead of their time, when host-based intrusion prevention systems (HIPS) were an interesting technology with very limited deployment. Now, some sort of HIPS is a required component of the new comprehensive endpoint security products, and the Okena and Entercept technologies formed the foundation for offerings from Cisco and McAfee, respectively.

This was first published in January 2008

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