IBM buys Consul

IBM Corp. will acquire Consul Risk Management Inc., a provider of compliance and security audit software. Terms were not disclosed.

Big Blue made the purchase to boost its service management offerings by adding key data governance and compliance monitoring, auditing and reporting capabilities across mainframe and distributed computing environments.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter 2007. Once the deal closes, IBM plans to roll Consul into its Tivoli software unit.

Consul is based in Delft, Netherlands, with its main U.S. office in Herndon, Va. It currently has about 350 customers around the globe.

The company provides an "auditor in a box" for compliance initiatives that uses a single management technology dashboard. A dashboard is a software product or application that can monitor information and display it quickly to a user.

The technology uncovers insider threats and delivers reports designed to address customers' compliance activities related to regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The technology complements IBM's existing security information and incident management capabilities to give clients applications that can monitor, audit and report on both users and technology.

IBM of Armonk, N.Y., has more than 329,000 employees and had annual sales of $91.1 billion in fiscal 2005. The company ranks No. 17 on Washington Technology's 2006 Top 100 list of the largest federal IT contractors.