Two years ago, the acquisition pace in the identity management space was fast and furious. That activity has slowed over the last 24 months, but it certainly has not stopped.
This is evidenced by the announcement that Microsoft has acquired Credentica's U-Prove technology.
Credentica has been an identity player for some time, and is spear-headed by Stefan Brands - an "identirati" that is known for his talents around all things crypto. Stefan has been warning the identity community about the privacy dangers in their existing technologies for years, and his warnings have apparently resonated with the folks at Microsoft, as evidenced by Kim Cameron's blog entry on the topic.
Stefan, on his own blog had this to say:
"I cannot begin to express how incredibly excited I am about this milestone. It marks not only the end of an entrepreneurial journey of fifteen years, but also the start of a tremendously exciting new phase that I have been working towards for a long time. To expound, from the early nineties on the technology has always enjoyed considerable interest from leading industry players, first for electronic cash purposes and later for digital identity and access control purposes. Throughout these years I ignored acquisition offers, primarily out of concern that the technology would end up in the dustbin. There were good reasons to believe this would be a likely outcome: user-centric identity was not on anyone's business agenda, multi-party security was deemed overkill even for military applications, and privacy-by-design was merely an academic pursuit. And so I decided to enter into business arrangements with much smaller companies and investment units whose interests were strategically aligned with mine. I also ignored venture capital, in spite of strong interest from investors; the lack of a convincing business model would likely have forced shareholders down a painful path, along the lines of what happened at two of my former licensees.
This time around, things are different - very different. For starters, the market needs in identity and access management have evolved to a point where technologies for multi-party security and privacy can address real pains. Secondly, there is no industry player around that I believe in as much as Microsoft with regard to its commitment to build security and privacy into IT systems and applications. Add to that Microsoft's strong presence in many of the target markets for identity and access management, its brain trust, and the fact that Microsoft can influence both the client and server side of applications like no industry player can, and it is easy to see why this is a perfect match."
Stefan and two other Credentica folks will be joining Microsoft's Identity and Access group.
And the acquisition cycle continues...
--Eric Norlin
