Yesterday, Quest announced the acquisition of Völcker Informatik. I've blogged about the impact on the IAM (and especially the Identity Provisioning) market yesterday. In this post, I'll focus on the impact on existing customers. Acquisitions are always a situation where FUD arises - fear, uncertainty, doubt. There are many examples of acquisitions where customers were on the looser's side afterwards, because their products of choice were (or are) supported only for a limited time before they had to migrate to another product. I won't bash on vendors here who have acted like that - you all probably know some examples for that situation.
When looking at Völcker customers, there shouldn't be much FUD. Völcker will continue it's development in Germany and the leading people will stay on board. Even more, Völcker will have significantly bigger resources available - and given that Völcker is very innovative and has also a strong understanding of IT Service Management, the customers should benefit from that. Beyond that, Völcker as part of Quest is a global player instead of a Hidden Gem which is "world-known in Germany" only. With other words: There are many opportunities and I don't see much risks. For sure an integration process might slow down things a little. But Quest is experienced enough in integrating acquisitions to mitigate these risks.
On the other side, there are the Quest ARS (Active Roles Server) customers. What is in for them? Quest ARS started as a tool for better, role-based management of Active Directory environments. Today it supports also some other systems. However, it is still Active Directory-centric. Quest has stated that both tools, Völcker ActiveEntry and Quest ARS, will play a vital role in their further strategy, with strong integration between both tools. Thus, Quest ARS remains a strong solution for Active Directory environments. And if it is about heterogeneous environments, ActiveEntry comes into play. It will be interesting to see how much Quest will invest in ARS support for heterogeneous systems. That probably is a slight risk for customers. But overall, the risk is relatively low.
Chances are good that this turns out to be one of the acquisitions where customers of both parties can benefit in the future. The reason is simple: There isn't that much overlap between the portfolios. And, from the KuppingerCole perspective, there is much more potential for synergies well beyond IAM and Identity Provisioning.
By the way: There are several reports available at www.kuppingercole.com/reports - on Quest products as well as Völcker products, and there is the Hidden Gem report which covers Völcker as the not-so-hidden-anymore vendor.