Nukona acquisition complements Symantec’s earlier acquisition of Odyssey Software, a leading provider of mobile device management (MDM).
Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that privately-held Nukona, Inc., is now part of Symantec. Symantec completed its acquisition of Nukona, a provider of mobile application management (MAM), on April 2, 2012. The acquisition agreement between Symantec and Nukona was announced on March 20, 2012.
The acquisition of Nukona extends Symantec's enterprise mobility portfolio to include a cross-platform mobile application protection solution to help organizations protect and isolate corporate data and applications across both corporate owned and personally owned devices. The acquisition of Nukona complements Symantec's earlier acquisition of Odyssey Software, a leading provider of mobile device management (MDM). By offering both MDM and MAM across multiple platforms, Symantec is helping CIOs address the "Bring Your Own Device" trend by satisfying the demands of their employees to use the devices and apps of their choice. These acquisitions further advance Symantec's enterprise mobility leadership by enhancing capabilities for mobile device, application and data protection.
"More and more organizations are mobilizing business applications and data, and we want to offer them a secure and efficient path to business critical mobilization," said CJ Desai, senior vice president, Endpoint and Mobility Group, Symantec. "By providing essential corporate controls like encryption and data loss prevention on a per-application basis, we can provide targeted information security and confidently increase mobile application adoption in the enterprise, helping our customers further address the 'Bring Your Own Device' movement."
Nukona provides an innovative approach to help enterprises seamlessly distribute, secure and control applications and data without requiring them to manage the complete devices. With Nukona's ability to natively protect and control iOS, Android and HTML5 apps, Symantec will address the core problem of corporate and personal data separation without limiting the end-user experience or application adoption.
"Symantec's acquisition of Nukona, as well as Odyssey Software, is important and valuable to IT infrastructure and operations professionals developing and managing mobile strategies," said Christian Kane, Analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester Research, Inc. "It is a major signal that the mobile management space is growing up since there is finally a single solution to address what these professionals care about today: devices, apps, and data." ¹
With Nukona, Symantec's approach will be unlike traditional proprietary sandbox solutions in that it will extend application protection that "wraps" both native and web-based apps with a management layer that allows IT to apply security policies without requiring any changes to the applications, leaving personal apps and activities untouched. In addition, the flexibility of cloud-based and on-prem enterprise app stores helps provide a seamless and scalable way to enable mobile application deployments. Nukona's secure content center also allows for the protection and synchronization of documents to minimize the risk of data loss.
