Microsoft Walks Off With Winternals

Microsoft picked up privately held data protection software company Winternals for an undisclosed sum today, as the vendor again looks to boost its security story. (See Microsoft Acquires Winternals.)

Austin, Texas-based Winternals offers a number of Windows-based systems recovery and data protection products that perform such tasks as network defragmentation and blocking unauthorized applications. The vendor is also behind the freeware tools Website Sysinternals, which averages around a million visitors a month.

Certainly, Microsoft has been cranking up its security message over recent months, unveiling new Web-based security services and coughing up cash for SSL VPN vendor Whale Communications. (See Microsoft Serves Up Security Services and Microsoft Acquires Whale.) Other Microsoft security acquisitions include managed services specialist FrontBridge and anti-virus specialist Sybari. (See Microsoft Pulls In FrontBridge, Microsoft Snaps Up Sybari, and Gates Opens Up on Security.)

"It carries on the trend of Microsoft buying smaller players with good ideas," says Paul Stamp, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "The endgame is that security becomes just another thing that the IT guys do -- Microsoft is trying to facilitate that."

Read the whole story at Dark Reading.James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch