IBM to buy audit, compliance firm

IBM plans to acquire privately held Consul Risk Management to enhance the compliance and security auditing capabilities of its Tivoli systems management software family.

IBM said Tuesday it expects to close its purchase of Consul in the first quarter of 2007. At that point, Consul will become part of IBM's Tivoli Software business unit. IBM didn't provide any financial details on the proposed transaction.

Consul's software lets customers track, report and investigate unauthorized access of corporate information by their employees. The company has two main software suites -- InSight, which focuses on the needs of enterprise users and zSecure, which targets mainframe users.

The breadth of coverage of both distributed and mainframe systems appealed to IBM, according to Joe Anthony, the company's program director for Tivoli Integrated Identity Management. "It offers a lot of very good value and is very unique," he said. Some of IBM's customers are particularly keen to use their mainframes as security hubs so the addition of Consul's zSecure will likely prove appealing to them, he added. Aside from Consul's support of IBM's System z mainframes, the companies previously had no formal relationship.

Although some industry analysts have put Tivoli Security Operations Manager, which debuted in July, and Consul's InSight in the same security information management category, Anthony doesn't see them as competing products. "Once you drill down, in terms of what they have, there's very minor overlap with Tivoli," he said.

IBM plans to provide details on a road map for Consul's software when it closes the acquisition next year. The vendor hopes to quickly integrate the technologies with Tivoli. "They should dovetail nicely together," Anthony said.

Acquiring Consul will complement the security management functionality IBM has within Tivoli software and the technology it gained from its $1.3 billion acquisition of Internet Security Systems, which closed in October, he added.

Consul will help Tivoli define and flag what customers determine to be "acceptable use" of their data by those permitted to view that information, Anthony said. "We were definitely not as deep in that area," he added. "Consul is much more thorough."

For instance, a bank may allow tellers to access customer information, Anthony said. Using the Consul software, the financial institution can track user behavior in accessing that data so it could be alerted that an individual teller was viewing 800 customer records per day when his or her peers were only examining 200 records.

IBM's plans to retain Consul's 89 worldwide staff and to keep both of the company's laboratories operational. Consul has dual headquarters in Herndon, Virginia, and in Delft in The Netherlands.

Consul, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in September, has about 350 customers, including Hanes, Fidelity Bank, Ford, Kroger, and Office Depot, many of whom are also Tivoli customers.