LANDESK and Heat Software are to be merged into one company.

With private investment firm Clearlake Capital announcing that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LANDESK from Thoma Bravo, its existing security brand Heat Software will be merged into one brand and will operate under a new corporate name, which will be announced at a later date.

The acquisition of LANDESK is expected to close this month and the combined company will be led by LANDESK CEO Steve Daly with Heat Software CEO John Ferron serving as executive chairman of the company’s Board of Directors.

“This is an exciting day for LANDESK,” said Daly. “We are thrilled to work with Clearlake in this next phase of our growth trajectory, as they bring significant endpoint security software domain expertise and cloud experience that will be critical to continue to build our platform organically and through acquisition.

“HEAT’s products align well with our mission to help our customers build modern, user-centered IT organizations and will provide additional expertise and capabilities as we accelerate our investments in the cloud.”

Duncan Brown, research director of the European Security Practice at IDC EMEA, toldInfosecurity that the benefit to users here was in the integration between IT Ops and security Ops.

“In big firms they are separate but in most mid-sized firms (and in many big firms that don’t specialize in security) there are combined, but poorly managed/integrated,” he said. “What we’re seeing here is better support for security in the IT Ops world.”

Brown said he believed that the new company will offer a more unified IT Security Ops product/service, and now users are choosing not to buy best of breed technology unless it integrates with what is deployed already.

He said: “The risk of too many security tools consuming too much management time, and the potential for poorly integrated systems missing threats or alerts, is now shifting behaviour towards a more integrated security stack.

“In some cases this will be served by using a security platform approach, such as those on offer from Symantec and BT. In other cases, security will become a more integrated part of IT Ops, and served by the likes of HEAT/LANDESK.”

Bob Tarzey, analyst and director at Quocirca, said that the merger of Lumension and FrontRange to form Heat Software made sense as it brought asset management, endpoint and update management together and as LANDESK offered endpoint management, it was competing with Heat Software in many areas.

“This strikes me as Clearlake picking up a struggling LANDESK cheap and seeing the customer base LANDESK has built up over many years as the main asset to cross sell too,” he told Infosecurity.

Ferron called the merger a “marriage of two organizations with a shared vision”, while Clearlake partner Prashant Mehrotra and vice-president James Pade said: “There is a critical need for enterprise IT to better understand what is happening in the user environment, while securing critical assets and data, and to have the operations management tools to take action when needed.

“We believe this transformational combination with HEAT will further enhance LANDESK’s scale, breadth of capabilities, and resources to deliver comprehensive solutions to address these complex IT security challenges and risks.”