14 DAY TRIAL // Global anti-virus vendor Trend Micro Inc. has announced an agreement to acquire Ottawa-based Third Brigade, a developer of host-based intrusion defense systems (HIDS). The company plans to integrate the technology into its own dynamic datacenter security products.
"This acquisition underscores our commitment to maintaining that leadership position, and accelerates our ongoing efforts to deliver innovative new solutions that are uniquely suited to dynamic datacenters, as they expand from physical to virtual and public/private cloud-computing environments," Eva Chen, Trend Micro's CEO, commented.
The transaction, which is set to finalize during the second half of the year, also includes the OSSEC project. OSSEC is an open-source HIDS solution, backed up by a strong community, which runs on a variety of platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. OSSEC was acquired by Third Brigade in June 2008, which expanded the commercial support for the product.
"Trend Micro is committed to maintaining OSSEC as an open source project," an announcement on the OSSEC website reads. "Like Third Brigade, Trend will help create broader awareness and further ensure the success of this thriving open source community through ongoing dedicated resources and extended support necessary for larger enterprise deployments," it adds.
The acquisition was preceded by an 18-month-long close collaboration between the two companies regarding the development of the Intrusion Defense Firewall plug-in for OfficeScan. "Our common vision for extending proven security and compliance techniques across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, combined with Trend Micro’s substantial industry, channel, and financial strengths will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation while reaching a global market of partners and customers," Wael Mohamed, president and CEO of Third Brigade, explains.
The Ottawa office of Third Brigade will be transformed into Trend Micro's headquarters in Canada and support of its products will be continued. The company currently has around 250 enterprise customers across the globe, some of which are Fortune 500 companies. "Third Brigade has leading-edge security and compliance solutions that allow Global 2000, SMBs and government organizations to better address the needs of their next-generation datacenters, and corporate endpoints," Ms. Chen notes.
On a side-note, Panda Security has also made a move on the cloud-based security scene and has just released the beta version of its free-for-personal-use Panda Cloud Antivirus.