The RES brand will disappear, and its technology will be folded into the Ivanti service management and digital workspace businesses.

Ivanti, the rebranding of the company created by last year’s merger of LANDESK and HEAT, has made another acquisition, Dutch-based RES Software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In the short-term, the RES brand will continue to be used with ‘Powered By’ branding, although that is slated to disappear, as the original sub-brands within Ivanti have. Ivanti is stressing however, that the RES product portfolio itself will not disappear, and that customers can count on them being fully supported and enhanced through their anticipated lifespan. RES has a significant partner channel, and the plan is also to absorb that in due course. Ivanti also signalled that they are not done with the acquisitions, as they continue their strategy of becoming a powerhouse in the digital workspace area.

Two years ago, RES was solidly focused on the digital workspace, and was the number two player in that space, behind AppSense. Now AppSense, acquired by LANDESK in 2016, is a key part of Ivanti. RES is also a rather different company than it was two years ago.

“They have been trying to pivot themselves into identity administration, which is a niche within service management – whitelisting workflows and that kind of thing,” said Jon Rolls, Ivanti’s VP of Product Management. “They have been moving into a different kind of market, and trying to distance themselves from the core workspace management market. You see them now more in the security space. They have had some success with this strategy.”

The two companies have been talking about a potential acquisition for some time.

“This has been an ongoing conversation which began before the merger of HEAT and LANDESK,” Rolls noted. “We’ve been talking to them for a while.”

For Ivanti, a key technology addition RES brings is their automation capabilities.

“Those automation capabilities have a lot of value,” Rolls said. “At Ivanti, we have a more mature service management business, and we will be using that automation technology to bolster our service management further.” In particular, RES’s ability to bulk provision and de-provision user accounts, combined with Ivanti’s process automation, will help organizations more effectively automate their onboarding and off-boarding processes.

Rolls also identified two other key parts of RES’s technology.

“Their Identity Director will also move into our service management technology, while their workspace piece is similar to our AppSense-based technology, and will go there,” he said.

In addition to the technology, Rolls saw several other big gains from the deal for Ivanti.

“They bring us new customers, and an increased presence in geos where we haven’t been strong, like the Benelux countries and northern Europe,” Rolls said. “They bring us a strong channel. This all strengthens our market as we become more of an IT powerhouse. Ivanti will be close to 2000 employees with this acquisition, and we aren’t done with the acquisition train.”

About the only thing that won’t be leveraged is the RES brand itself. As Ivanti has done since the company was rebranded, existing and newly-acquired brands are being removed to focus the branding squarely on Ivanti.

“We will use the ‘Powered By RES’ brand at first, but it will fade over time,” Rolls said. “We will likely retire the RES brand within six months of acquisition.”

Rolls said that RES channel is very significant, and a part of the company’s value.

“It’s one of the big benefits of the deal,” he indicated. “We gain access to a very enthusiastic channel, and are very keen to work with them.” The plan is to absorb the RES channel program into Ivanti’s own program over time.

“We are looking forward to welcoming the RES channel,” Rolls said. “Ivanti will have a lot more products for them to sell, and hopefully they will find new synergies there.”

Ivanti is emphasizing to RES customers that on the product front, nothing will change.

“The products they know and love from RES will continue to be supported and maintained,” Rolls said. “In the short-term, everything will stay, and nothing will be end-of-lifed any time soon, before it would have if the acquisition had not taken place. The intent over time is to bring together the best of the technologies.”