Mergers between apparent equals aren't that common in technology and in this case appears to be driven by the private equity owners of Lumension, Clearlake Capital Group, recently acquiring FrontRange with a view to doing a bit of industry consolidation.
FrontRange is a fairly anonymous but solid software management tools firm from the late 1980s that some in the UK will recall bought local IT asset management firm Centennial Software in 2008. Although not well known, some of its products such as the GoldMine CRM software will ring a few bells.
A more familiar name, Lumension's specialty is patch management which goes back to its birth in 2007 through the fusing of PatchLink and Luxembourg firm SecureWave. Taken over by Clearlake in August 2014, the money men made cutbacks in an attempt to tame the business model.
With name changes, the first question is why. In this case it's a case of invigorating an old brand and reinvigorating a newer one that had perhaps lost its way. Customers still find this sort of thing confusing not helped by the fact that Lumension was barely mentioned in the official press release.
"Thanks to the strong financial backing and operational expertise from Clearlake, we will now be able to add Lumension's best-in-class endpoint management and protection solutions that greatly complement FrontRange's existing HEAT platform," said former FrontRange CEO, Jonathan Temple, who will lead Heat Software.
For the historic record, the Lumension name that now disappears was a combination of the word 'luminescence' and the phrase 'new dimension.'
The new board will feature several Clearlake Capital's notables which makes the invention of Heat Software sounds more and more like an exercise in business as much as technological engineering.
Only days ago, Lumension announced a plug-in that allows it to patch third-party software products from within Microsoft System Center environments.