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Click here for a list of 40 acquisitions that have occurred in the past four years. (PDF).
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As in the case with Pentz, support can be mangled. His frustrating odyssey started with e-mails and calls to an engineer, who spoke vaguely, offered no answers and stopped returning all calls or e-mail within a week. Even when upper management promised to take care of things, nothing happened. There were more broken promises when the vendor tried to sell Pentz a renewal on his maintenance contract. Fed up, Pentz switched to another security product. But based on this experience, he's leery when buying new security equipment and is left wondering if the vendor will be bought by one of the "big boys" and cu...

With all the mergers and acquisitions happening in the information security market, buyers have good reason to wonder if their vendor will be around tomorrow.

Even fairly established security players, such as NetScreen Technologies and Sybari Software, have been gobbled up by larger companies. In a span of just three weeks last November, four companies were swallowed by bigger fish: Teros by Citrix Systems; V-Secure Technologies by Radware; Trustgenix by Hewlett-Packard; and Cyota by RSA Security. In the surge of consolidation, some market segments have been absorbed almost entirely. Web access management providers Netegrity, Oblix and Securant were all acquired by larger vendors (CA, Oracle and RSA Security, respectively). The managed security space is another where acquisitions have left few pure-play providers.

But while vendors wheel and deal, where does all this consolidation leave the user? It can spell trouble, as in Pentz's case. However, an acquisition--done correctly--can make a security manager's life easier by providing integrated technology that is less complicated to manage and cheaper.

In their shopping frenzy, vendors "are trying to develop portfolios that are as comprehensive as possible to get a bigger slice of a company's security budget," says Brian Schwartz, technology specialist at IT solution provider CDW. "Sometimes that can work out well for a customer, and sometimes not."

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