Yesterday, One Identity announced that they have acquired Balabit, a company specialized on Privileged Management, headquartered in Luxembourg but with their main team located in Hungary. One Identity, a Quest Software business, counts amongst the leading vendors in the Identity Management market. Aside of their flagship product One Identity Manager, they deliver a number of other products, including Safeguard as their Privilege Management offering. Balabit, on the other hand, is a pure-play Privilege Management vendor, offering several products with particular strengths around Session Management and Privileged Behavior Analytics.
One Identity already has a technical integration with Balabit’s Session Management product as a part of their Safeguard offering. With the acquisition, One Identity gets direct access to one of the leading Session Management technologies, but also the Privileged Behavior Analytics capabilities of Balabit. Combined with the One Identity Safeguard capabilities, this results in a comprehensive Privilege Management offering, from Shared Account Password Management to Session Management and Privileged Behavior Analytics. Given that there is already some integration, we expect One Identity to progress fast on creating a fully integrated solution. Another advantage might occur from the fact that still a significant portion of the One Identity Manager team is based in Germany, geographically relatively close to Hungary.
The acquisition strengthens the position of One Identity in both the Privilege Management market and the overall Identity Management market. For Privilege Management, the combined portfolio and the expected close integration moves One Identity into the group of the market leaders, with respect to both the number of customers and technical capabilities. One Identity becomes a clear pick for every shortlist, when evaluating vendors in this market segment.
When looking at the overall Identity Management market, One Identity improves its position as one of the vendors that cover all major areas of that market, with particular strengths in IGA (Identity Governance and Administration, i.e. Identity Provisioning and Access Governance) and Privilege Management, but also in Identity Federation and Cloud SSO, plus other capabilities such as cloud-based MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication). For companies that focus on single sourcing for Identity Management or at least one core supplier, One Identity becomes an even more interesting choice now.
The acquisition underpins the strategy that One Identity had announced after the split of Quest Software from Dell and the creation of One Identity as a separate business of Quest Software: playing a leading role in the overall Identity Management market as a vendor that covers all major areas of this market segment.