System iNetwork

September 3, 2008

Business As Usual for PowerTech After Help/Systems Acquisition

In a security and compliance-focused interview with John Earl, CTO and VP of PowerTech, my colleague, Linda Harty, and I had to ask about the surprisingly quiet acquisition of PowerTech by Help/Systems and its private equity muscle.

Basically, much is as we already suspected or was previously reported: PowerTech will retain the PowerTech brand and continue to run as a separate company that's focused on security. While there are some areas of synergy for customers and the product lines, it's going to be business as usual for PowerTech.

"I think it's really a great fit between a couple of companies that have carved out leadership niches in the OS/400 utility space. I'd like to think PowerTech has carved out a leadership spot--I know for sure that Help/Systems has," Earl said.

"What we're seeing here is a couple of really good companies coming together and we're in a position to augment each other's products. We've had interfaces to Help/Systems' Robot/ALERT and Robot/CONSOLE products in our Authority Broker and Network Security products for as long as I can remember. They are just a natural fit and we never thought we'd go out and build a competing kind of product because we knew that the Robot products did that message management and the alerting capabilities so well," he noted, adding, "There's just a number of great places where we fit together and I think these two product lines can add a lot of value for both of our customer sets."

For the full interview that focuses on security and compliance, check out Linda's "Straight Talk About Getting Your Company into Compliance" post on Product Lines.

Posted by cmaxcer at September 3, 2008 9:43 PM