Axway just announced it will acquire the security specialist Vordel; and you might ask, does this make sense at all?

I do believe it does!

Actually, I was personally evaluating security vendors as an acquisition target for middleware vendors and B2B integration companies a number of times over the last five years as a Forrester analyst (and before).

The need to modernize security around integration scenarios becomes more important than ever:

• Traditional B2B integration over private networks is more and more replaced with B2B connectivity and cloud-based integration over the Internet.
• Traditional rigid EDI gateways still exist and handle huge volumes, but many new applications are developed in the cloud and access synchronous REST or SOAP APIs for immediate customer and partner engagement.
• Large enterprises have heterogeneous integration strategies to meet different characteristics of integration. See my recent blog for an overview.

Enterprises see an increasing value in openness, and some are even starting to sell commercial real-time access to their applications. The more the boundaries of an enterprise are extended by integration offerings, the more a federation of security becomes important. It’s today mainly a federated identity management and will be soon a more sophisticated open API management. Forrester’s vision goes even beyond, introducing “Trust-Relationship-Models” in Business Networks – Maybe a direction some of the current integration vendors and innovative startups will embrace soon.

Let me know you opinion. Are you hitting the limits of security capabilities in your planned integration scenarios?

Stefan Ried