Today CA Technologies announced an agreement to acquire Arcot Systems, Inc. This transaction will result in several immediate and longer term benefits for our customers.  Current on-premise IAM customers, particularly customers of CA SiteMinder, will gain immediate benefits by using Arcot's strong authentication and fraud prevention capabilities to complement their well established SiteMinder deployments. 

Over the past 10-plus years CA SiteMinder has become the "gold standard" Web access management product on the market, literally defining what it means to be a WAM product.  The addition of Arcot's strong authentication and online fraud prevention - deployed either on-premise or from the cloud - significantly extends CA SiteMinder's value to the enterprise.  SiteMinder's centralized security position within its customer base means that the organization can experience increased security and reduced fraud while continuing to improve the user experience.  For example adding one-time password (OTP) authentication for Web users without having to issue physical tokens is a boon to both security and usability on Web sites and is a great example of an identity service offered from the cloud.  This OTP service is well described in a short video that can be found here. 

CA has clearly stated our strategy for cloud security: enable organizations to extend existing on-premises IAM systems to support cloud applications and services; provide IAM technology to cloud providers to secure their services - whether public, private or hybrid; and enable IAM services from the cloud. The acquisition of Arcot significantly accelerates our delivery of identity services from the cloud - making them available today.  If you need multi-factor authentication as a cloud service, it is available now.  If you need OTP as a service, without the annoying tokens for users to carry around, it is available now.

And finally, not only will Arcot bring to CA a proven set of "from the cloud" security services of strong authentication and fraud prevention, it also will bring many years of experience and technology which underlie these services. Combining Arcot's cloud security platform with CA's deep bench of IAM solutions - CA Identity Manager, CA SiteMinder, CA Federation Manager, CA DLP to name just four - positions CA to to more quickly offer even more identity services from the cloud.

For the cloud to truly reach its potential, it is critical that it become more enterprise-ready from a security and management perspective.  The combination of CA Technologies and Arcot advances the enterprise-ready cloud.