Likewise Sets Sights on High-Growth Storage Market, Announces Asset Sale to BeyondTrust

SOURCE:  Likewise

Likewise Software, Inc. announced today that it is accelerating investment in its storage software business – selling its Active Directory Bridge business unit, including its Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise software products, to BeyondTrust. Terms of the deal were not announced.

“The storage software business has seen the highest growth and has been the most strategic part of our business. We’re doubling down on our commitment to building out our next-generation storage platform,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Likewise Software. “This sale brings additional capital, allowing us to invest more heavily in our storage direction.”

“Over the past years, we’ve worked with some of the largest names in the storage industry and they have asked us to apply our expertise and leadership in the identity business toward addressing the challenge of providing secure, cross-platform storage across physical, virtual and cloud environments,” Crist continued.

The company’s OEM products, Likewise Storage Services and the Likewise Identity Service, provide consistent and secure access to data with cross-platform support on Linux of the CIFS/SMB and NFS protocols, for simple-to-manage, low-cost, NAS-enabled storage. In addition, the company will bring to market an end-user product for the enterprise, built on the Likewise Storage Services platform.

Likewise is an open source company that provides a software platform for identity, security and storage, which improves security and reduces operational costs without sacrificing scalability or performance of storage devices in mixed network environments. Likewise Storage Services combines vital open source components, including CIFS/SMB support, with the company’s own proprietary technology.

The acquisition of the Active Directory Bridge business unit expands the BeyondTrust portfolio of ‘inside perimeter’ privilege delegation, monitoring and auditing solutions to include authentication and auditing management for cloud environments.

“For years, Likewise has been a leader in helping businesses bridge Linux, Unix and Mac environments to Microsoft Active Directory,” said Robin Budd, vice president of engineering, Likewise. “We’re confident BeyondTrust will continue to build upon the success of Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise. The BeyondTrust family of products are now the most comprehensive suite of identity and privileged access management products on the market.”

“When evaluating the most efficient way to this market, we were struck not just by Likewise’s expertise and advanced technology, we were particularly interested in their open source business model,” said Jim Zierick, executive vice president, products at BeyondTrust. “Likewise Open offers not just a path to sales, but a true mechanism for advancing the technology and providing a free, valuable resource to the industry. We look forward to maximizing our community involvement and offering the most extensive suite of authentication engines in the industry.”

About Beyond Trust

Founded in 1985, BeyondTrust is the global leader in privilege authorization management, access control and security solutions for virtualization and cloud computing environments. BeyondTrust empowers IT governance to strengthen security, improve productivity, drive compliance and reduce expense. The company’s products eliminate the risk of intentional, accidental and indirect misuse of privileges on desktops and servers in heterogeneous IT systems. More than half of the companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rely on BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker suite of products to secure their enterprises.

About Likewise

Likewise makes an integrated software platform for identity, security and storage used by market-leading storage vendors such as HP and EMC. Likewise enables organizations to provide both access to and control of their assets across mixed network environments. More information is available at the company’s website, www.likewise.com.