IBM Posed To Acquire Database Startup Guardium

Reports are emerging that IBM is posed to acquire database security vendor Guardium for $225 million (£206 million), with an announcement expected this week.

Reports of the deal first surfaced late last week in Israeli newspaper TheMarker. Officials at IBM declined to comment on the rumours. If it goes forward, the deal would be a significant acquisition in the database activity monitoring space, which earlier this year saw Netezza purchase Tizor Systems.

Founded in 2002, Guardium’s product line spans database monitoring, enforcement, reporting and vulnerability assessment. The Guardium platform includes support for database products not only IBM, but also Oracle, Microsoft, Teradata, Sybase and Sun Microsystems (MySQL).

Guardium competes with a number of companies, including Application Security, Sentrgio and Imperva.

Industry analyst Adrian Lane blogged that IBM has been interested in database activity monitoring (DAM) for many years, and that Guardium fits nicely with their portfolio.

“Guardium is one of the only firms still standing with a mainframe monitoring solution, which is a major prerequisite for much of IBM ‘s customer base,” blogged Lane, an analyst with Securosis. “From the IBM perspective, the functionality makes sense and fits well into some of their existing security products. From an architectural standpoint, integration (as opposed to just sharing data and events) will be a challenge.”