Patchlink tries to breathe new life into Harris STAT

Patchlink announced today that they had taken Harris STAT off of the hands of Harris Corporation.  This is pretty much in line with their CEO Pat Clawson's plan to do acquisitions and fits the mold of acquisitions he has done in the past at other companies.  What is Harris STAT you ask.  It is a vulnerability scanner.  About 2 years ago they did an OEM deal with Patchlink, where Patchlink was integrated into their product.

If you are not active in the government market you may have never heard of STAT or Harris even.  Harris is huge in the federal market. They make a lot of advanced communications gear for the DoD.  STAT was always out of their sweet spot I thought, but with the Harris machine pushing it, it was widely used within in the various defense department networks.  I say was, not is though.  About 2 or 3 years ago DISA did a DoD wide deal with eEye and Citadel for the Retina scanner and Hercules patch manager.  Since that time STAT has basically been a dead man walking. In the 5 years we have sold vulnerability management products, we have never seen STAT outside of the government space.  The Hercules contract (now owned by McAfee) is also the reason why Patchlink has not been able to break into the DoD.  I would imagine that with this background and it not really being in its sweet spot, Harris was only too happy to offload STAT and Patchlink probably got a sweet (read cheap) deal.

Now the question is, what does Patchlink do with this?  They talk about it advancing their strategy for Unified End Point Security Management Framework.  Sounds to me like they would like to take on Big Fix from that. Not really sure this deal gets them there though. Frankly, I think they might find buying a vulnerability scanner and keeping it up to snuff in this hyper competitive market may be a bigger bite then they were looking to chew.