Vendor lineage
Ivanti
A 2017 company assembled from forty years of other people's software, and the place two vendors on this site came to rest.
Ivanti was created on 23 January 2017 when Clearlake Capital bought LANDESK from Thoma Bravo and merged it with HEAT Software. Neither half was new: the lineage behind it runs back to 1985, and almost nothing in the portfolio was written by the company whose name is on it.
The LANDESK side began as LANSystems in 1985, was acquired by Intel in 1991 and run as its LANDESK division, and was spun out as an independent company in 2002. Avocent bought it in 2006 for $416M - the same Avocent that appears elsewhere on this timeline in the Cyclades lineage - and Thoma Bravo took it in 2010. Along the way LANDESK absorbed Wavelink (2012), Shavlik from VMware (2013), Naurtech (2014), Xtraction (2015) and AppSense (2016).
The HEAT side was itself assembled, formed in 2015 from FrontRange Solutions and Lumension Security. Lumension had started as High Tech Software in 1991 and been renamed PatchLink in 1999.
Ivanti kept buying: Concorde Solutions and RES Software in 2017, then Cherwell and RiskSense. In September 2020 it announced the acquisition of both MobileIron and Pulse Secure, completing on 1 December that year - which is how two companies that appear elsewhere on this site came to end on the same day, in the same place.
MobileIron had been founded in 2007 by Ajay Mishra and Suresh Batchu and taken public on NASDAQ in 2014. Pulse Secure carried Juniper's SSL VPN business, sold to Siris Capital in 2014.
The company became more widely known after serious vulnerabilities in the VPN appliances it sells, which is worth recording rather than omitting: a portfolio assembled from a dozen acquisitions inherits a dozen codebases, and the security posture of the whole is the security posture of the weakest piece.
2017 Concorde Solutions and RES Software
Software asset management from the UK, and workspace automation and identity from the Netherlands and US.
The service-management and automation layers.
2020 MobileIron
Mobile device management and zero-trust access for endpoints. Announced September 2020, completed 1 December.
Ajay Mishra and Suresh Batchu, 2007; IPO on NASDAQ 2014
Ivanti Neurons for MDM. MobileIron appears on this site in its own right as a Red Education training partner.
2020 Pulse Secure
Hybrid secure access, acquired in the same announcement and completed the same day as MobileIron.
- 2014 Juniper's SSL VPN business (by Siris Capital) — Pulse Secure was carved out of Juniper and sold to private equity, which is why a company founded in 2014 carried a product line older than itself. Juniper is a chapter in this site's own career record.
Ivanti Connect Secure - the VPN line that later drew serious vulnerability disclosures.
- Ivanti: LANDESK history - LANSystems 1985, Intel 1991, spin-off 2002, Thoma Bravo, the acquisition list
- Wikipedia: Ivanti - formation January 2017, Avocent's $416M purchase, HEAT from FrontRange and Lumension
- Wikipedia: MobileIron - founded 2007, IPO 2014, acquired by Ivanti
- Redmond Magazine: Ivanti buys MobileIron and Pulse Secure (September 2020)