Progress, a provider of application development and digital experience technologies, is set to acquire Ipswitch, a producer of secure data file transfer, mailing tools, and network management software. As shown below, major acquistions are nothing new to Ipswitch, which had previously acquired tools for file transfers, messaging, and collaboration. What is new is that Ipswitch itself has become the acquistion target. Now, what lies ahead in the roadmap for Ipswitch is unclear and seems directionless.
The downside of acquisition
With new management, processes and operations are bound to change. Revamped roadmap promises, framework modifications, and back-end changes should be expected. Moreover, customer support employees will likely need to up-skill, leaving the customer lost for a while.
What about your data?
What really happens in an acquisition is something similar to the story of King Solomon where he decides, in the interest of being fair, to divide a baby into equal parts to share with two quarreling women, each claiming maternity of the child. It all turned out to be a clever ruse to discover who would put the child’s interest above their own.
On acquisition, data is usually integrated into the purchasing company’s already existing systems. That fact is displayed in the fine print — the type often glossed over or skipped completely by users. If you want to opt out of your data being transferred, things can get a bit tricky and often create a major headache. Additionally, new processes or technologies used after the merger might require more data to be squeezed out of unwilling customers.
As companies take over businesses, and as corporations sell their user databases at dizzying rates, you might ask a very sobering question: Who has my data? And more often than not, the answer is, who knows?
“Consumers hardly have any control over sharing, flow and usage of their data,” says Paul Kubler, a digital forensics and cyber security examiner at LIFARS, a digital forensics and cyber security intelligence firm in New York City.
Why this won’t happen with ManageEngine
No frills, R&D driven, and charged by customer feedback, that’s ManageEngine. Our privacy policy tells you what information we do collect from you, what we do with it, who can access it, and what you can do about it. We use your information to provide the services you use, and keep an eye out for unauthorized activity on your accounts. No selling of customer data: this is our thumb rule.
We believe in being a bootstrapped manufacturer and provider of functional, easy-to-use, comprehensive, end-to-end IT management software. Our 90-plus tools help you manage all your IT operations, including networks, servers, applications, service desk, Active Directory, security, desktops, and mobile devices. And we’ve built our tools from the ground up with contextual integrations to make sure you can manage IT together, too. In simple terms, if we need a tool, our engineers make it. If it turns out to be great, we sell it to customers who also need it.
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