Optiv Security Bets Big On Identity And Access Management Market With Advancive Acquisition

Optiv Security, formerly Accuvant and FishNet Security, has made its first acquisition move as a combined company, revealing Tuesday that it had bought identity and access management consultancy Advancive.

Terms of the deal, which closed Friday, were not disclosed.

Advancive, based in Pasadena, Calif., focuses on providing services and solutions around identity and access management. That's an area that Denver-based Optiv is looking to place a big bet on in the coming year, Bryan Wiese, vice president of identity and access management, told CRN. The identity and access management space is one of Optiv's fastest-growing business practices, he said, with 40 percent to 50 percent year-over-year growth for the past three years.

[Related: Optiv Security Joins Identity Defined Security Alliance]

"For Optiv, this is a big thing," Wiese said. "From here on, we are going to continue to see a lot of growth from an identity and access management perspective."

The acquisition nearly doubles Optiv's current identity and access management practice, Wiese said, adding 35 new employees to Optiv's 50 and adding new capabilities around services and solutions. In particular, Wiese said, Advancive brings new vendor specialties around Ping Identity and RSA, adding to Optiv's expertise with CyberArk and SailPoint. Advancive also adds capabilities around managed security services for identity and access management and global consulting and services capabilities with the company's offshore office in Bangalore, India.

Those capabilities will prove key for Optiv, Wiese said, as the market for identity and access management continues to grow and change in the coming years. According to research firm MarketsandMarkets, the identity and access management market is expected to grow from $7.2 billion in 2015 to $12.8 billion in 2020. Wiese said Optiv is already seeing "a ton" of growth in the space, driven by customer demand for better solutions in response to many recent breaches that involved identity issues.

"Within Optiv, we're aligning our messaging and focus and growth around growing identity to address those concerned customers," Wiese said. "We're doing this, not just to tackle the growth we're seeing but position us for bigger, larger growth going forward."

Advancive co-founders Art Poghosyan and Alex Gudanis will take new positions at Optiv to help spearhead some of those areas that the company sees as key in the identity and access management market going forward, Wiese said. Poghosyan will now serve as vice president of managed identity and access management at Optiv, building from the ground up a practice around managed security services for identity and access management. Gudanis will be responsible for running a new intellectual property development group at Optiv, focused on adding value through product integrations and solutions.

The integration of the two companies will take place over the next 120 days, Wiese said. That process will include combining customer bases as well as internal people from a culture, process and benefits perspective. Wiese said there are no plans to relocate employees at this point.

"Even though this is an acquisition from a company perspective, it's really a merger," Wiese said. "We will merge everything from a delivery methodology perspective, tools perspective and people perspective over the next 120 days." The result, he said, will be a "new, shiny, better identity and access management consultancy" within Optiv.

The Advancive acquisition "certainly won't be the last" move by Optiv to grow inorganically in the coming months, Wiese said. He declined to comment on what other areas Optiv might be looking to make acquisitions in.