Ipswitch Acquires MessageWay In Merger Of Managed File Transfer Vendors

Ipswitch, a maker of secure, managed file transfer products and services, on Tuesday will announce it has acquired MessageWay Solutions, a provider of managed file transfer and business integration solutions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With the addition of MessageWay to its product family, Ipswitch will provide a wide range of secure file transfer services and capabilities, including of advanced analytics, enterprisewide monitoring, and high-performance data translation and transformation for EDI, ERP, and a variety of other message formats, the companies said.

"When people in the industry talk about security, one of the things that they don't often mention is that about 80 percent of the exchanges that go on between companies are exchanges of files between applications, not between people sitting at a desk typing at a computer," says Greg Faubert, president of MessageWay. "This is an area that's becoming more important all the time."

"The file transfer market is changing, not only in the volume and size of messages, but in the way they are handled," says Gary Shottes, president of Ipswitch. "The worlds of managed file transfer, EDI, and middleware, which have typically been handled by different vendors, are converging. We think we'll be in a position to take market share away from all of those more focused players, by offering solutions that provide a more integrated approach." The need for managed file transfer is increasing as organizations look for ways to meet industry and regulatory requirements, such as SOX, PCI, FISMA, and HIPAA, the executives said. Many enterprises need a better way to show a "chain of custody" on file transfers, proving to auditors that data is safe as it travels between partners.

"What we offer is the ability to exchange files securely through the DMZ without the file ever landing on disk," Faubert says. "Companies can submit files or retrieve files through an open protocol, but without the file ever residing in the red zone.

"Once the data gets to its destination, it's encrypted and housed in a secure database," Faubert explains. "The only way for an attacker to get into those files would be for them to have access to the physical disk, all of the encryption keys, and a copy of our software."

Ipswitch expects its combined offerings to get traction in industries where secure file transfer is required, such as financial services, government, and healthcare.

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