Securent

Securent, Inc. operated as a provider of policy and entitlement management software for enterprise clients. The company was founded in 2005 by Rajiv Gupta, a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in enterprise software and security. Gupta's background includes an 11-year tenure at Hewlett-Packard, where he was instrumental in developing early web services technologies, followed by the founding of Confluent Software, which was later acquired by Oracle. This experience in policy-based management and web services directly informed Securent's mission.

The firm's core offering was the Entitlement Management Solution (EMS), a platform built on the XACML standard, designed to give enterprises a centralized point of control for managing user access to data and applications. This allowed client organizations to administer, enforce, and audit fine-grained access policies across diverse and heterogeneous IT environments, including different vendors, platforms, and operating systems. The software addressed the growing need for robust access control as businesses shifted towards service-oriented architectures and Web 2.0 collaboration tools. The business model focused on selling this software to large enterprises that required a unified way to secure distributed resources and sensitive application data.

In a significant milestone, Cisco Systems announced its definitive agreement to acquire Securent in November 2007 for approximately $100 million in cash and assumed options. At the time of the acquisition, the Mountain View, California-based company had 57 employees, with development operations in Hyderabad, India. The deal was finalized on November 19, 2007, and the Securent team was integrated into Cisco's Collaboration Software Group. The acquisition was part of Cisco's broader strategy to enhance its network services with standards-based policy management and to move further into the applications space.

Keywords: entitlement management, access control, policy management, XACML, authorization management, information security, enterprise software, data security, application security, identity management, Rajiv Gupta, Cisco acquisition, heterogeneous IT, service-oriented architecture, network security, collaboration software, access policy enforcement, IT audit, compliance management, fine-grained authorization