Centrify Recognized by Linux Magazine as "Top 20 Company to Watch" for Windows and Linux Interoperability

Monday, January 21, 2008

It was neat to see that Linux Magazine has published its annual list of "Top 20 Companies to Watch" and Centrify was on the list. We were the only security software company and the only one focusing on delivering Windows and Linux interoperability on the list. Centrify was touted for helping Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X "all just get along" and providing "the glue" to enable interoperability between these heterogeneous systems. The editors further recognized Centrify's DirectControl solution by noting "…anything that fosters interoperability is going to be a hot technology."

Besides Centrify, others on the list that will "have a major impact on the market" included Google, Red Hat, Sun, and Microsoft. Some of you may be surprised that Microsoft is on the list, but given the deal they did with Novell to distribute coupons for SUSE it is my back-of-the-envelope calculation that Microsoft is the No. 2 commerical "deliverer" of Linux licenses in the market behind Red Hat (in other words, they are driving more units of SUSE then Novell is doing by itself).

Here is the thought process and criteria that Linux Magazine used to select their top 20:

"Who knows what the future will hold? Well, heaven knows we don't or we'd have already won the lottery a few times and retired to a private island somewhere. However, we can look at the past to make a few reasonable predictions-- such as the companies in the free and open source software community that are going to have a major impact on the market in 2008. …

Once again we've read the tea leaves in preparation for the coming year, to attempt to foresee the companies and technologies that will be preeminent in 2008. The criteria for selection? Obviously, picking the" Top 20" companies is a fairly subjective exercise, and in the end it was a matter of opinion. However, to make the list, a company had to be involved in the FOSS community (one way or another) and have a major impact on that community.

Just being a consumer of FOSS technologies isn't enough — a company needs to contribute in some way."

Here are some of the impactful things we have done off the top of my head that probably led to the editors of Linux Magazine to select Centrify for this prestigious list:

• We were one of the first companies to seamlessly integrate Linux (and UNIX and Mac systems and Java and J2EE and databases and …) into Active Directory (reasons to do so are blogged about here and the benefits of doing so are blogged about here).
• We were the first to deliver Mac Group Policy and integrate virtualization platforms such as VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer into Active Directory while at the same time being the only solution to be Windows Certified.
• We have contributed bug fixes and code to open source projects such as OpenLDAP, Kerberos, OpenSSH, Samba, PuTTY and WinSCP.
• We provide and deliver technical support services for open source projects such as Samba and OpenSSH as well as provide precompiled versions of those projects to make customers lives easier.
• We are a founding sponsor of the Kerberos Consortium and help support open source projects such as Kerberos and WinSCP via cash donations.

We contribute in other areas as well, but I think the biggest impact that we have had is the fact that over 40% of the Fortune 50 and over 4000 enterprise customers are using our software to integrate their UNIX and Linux systems into Active Directory (i.e. we deliver real value for customers), and as Linux Magazine says, "anything that fosters interoperability is going to be a hot technology."

Here is Linux Magazine's full write up on Centrify:

"Can't we all just get along? That's the hope of most IT administrators. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X are inevitable components of most IT environments, and anything that fosters interoperability is going to be a hot technology.

Centrify just happens to sell a solution along those lines. Centrify DirectControl integrates non-Microsoft systems with Microsoft's Active Directory. Like it or loathe it, Active Directory isn't going anywhere. Companies that have spent the money to deploy Active Directory are likely to stick with it, so DirectControl provides the glue between the systems.

The company also offers an auditing solution, DirectAudit, to help with troubleshooting and auditing of user sessions on Linux and other* nix systems. We find this a bit less compelling than its DirectControl product, but it's probably a draw for companies that have to worry about Sarbanes-Oxley and other fun compliance requirements.

As Linux continues to infiltrate the enterprise, we expect to hear more about Centrify in the coming year."

We recently won another award in the Linux space, which I will talk about in my next blog post, and then go back to talking about some customer deployments.

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