In one of its first major moves in acquiring virtual security technology firms, Trend Micro bought Third Brigade, a virtualization security and compliance software company based in Ottawa, Canada.
The two companies have been working together for more than a year, and Trend Micro, which is based in Toyko, with U.S. offices in Cupertino, Calif., sells OEM versions of Third Brigade's products for its OfficeScan systems.
Third Brigade also owns and directs the open-source OSSEC project, which develops a host-based intrusion detection system. The company said that it will keep the project open and will continue to sell support for it.
Trend Micro is committed to the Third Brigade existing product roadmap, which includes extending security and compliance features across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, the company said in its announcement. It added that it will continue to offer Third Brigade standalone products for the near term and will gradually integrate Third Brigade capabilities into the Trend Micro product line.
"Third Brigade is a pretty good fit with Trend Micro,” Scott Crawford, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates, told SCMagazineUS.com Wednesday. “Third Brigade is taking a fairly comprehensive approach to the virtualization issues in terms of integrating directly with virtualization infrastructures.”
That fits with Trend's strategy, too, he said.
“It's still very early days for virtualization security,” Crawford added. “And customers are still wondering how best to integrate security with their virtualization strategy, particularly since [drivers such as] threats in the wild have not become all that prevalent.”
Trend Micro has no immediate plans for layoffs at Third Brigade, said Punit Minocha, vice-president of corporate business development at Trend Micro USA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
