On Monday, Computer Associates announced their intent to acquire DLP player Orchestria. With Provilla getting snagged by Trend Micro, Tablus by RSA, Vontu by Symantec and Reconnex by McAfee, it feels like the last year or so has been DLP speed dating. A few weeks ago, after the Microsoft/RSA announcement (our take on it here) , our Guest Researcher and Resident-Expert-For-All-Things-DLP-Related, Jared Thorkelson indicated that his phone had been ringing with inquiries about who CA was looking to pick up.
Had we not been distracted by the holidays, we should’ve called this one. Quite frankly, with the composition of the Orchestria management team, we should have called this one a long time ago. As we noted in our breakdown of Palo Alto’s latest round of funding (article here), it’s all about who you know and where your roots are laid down. In this case, all of the following Orchestria management team members were CA alumni:
- Paul Dean, SVP of Product Management: Formerly an AVP of storage at CA overseeing the ArcServe and SurviveIT product lines.
- Peter Malcolm, Founder and CTO: He joined CA from the acquisition of Cheyenne Software where he was the VP of Engineering and went on to become the SVP of Business Management at CA. He was also over the SurviveIT product line and then went on to tackle the entire storage line. After that, he moved over to Benchmark Capital as their European “Entrepreneur in Residence”. It’s no surprise then that Benchmark is an investor in Orchestria.
- Andrew Stickler, SVP of Engineering: Stickler and Malcolm date back to IQ International, a company founded and led by Malcolm that was acquired by Cheyenne in 1996. p[ost-acquisition, Stickler worked on the SurviveIT and ARCserve products.
We continue to encourage our community, specifically those of you buying technologies but also those VARs with a portfolio to manage, to research the companies you do business with. While you may be very happy with the relationship thusfar, as more and more of the big players look toward “off balance sheet R&D”, we will see more smaller players getting picked off (if they survive long enough). By understanding where the relationships are, you can gain some insight into who possible suitors are and where the technology might be headed.
As always, we are here to help. Don’t hesitate to submit a research inquiry before you make a purchasing decision. We can also help you narrow the field to those companies that are best aligned with your currently portfolio of tools.
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