Network titan Cisco has announced an agreement to secure policy management software vendor Securent for around $100m. The deal, acquisition number 125 for Cisco, is expected to close in Q2 of its financial year, January 2008.

Securent's Entitlement Management Solution (EMS) gives enterprises the ability to manage access to their entire hardware and software rollout, in Windows and non-Windows environments. Securent said that EMS is " the first proven XACML standard-based solution that allows organisations to create, enforce, review, and audit fine-grained access policies across heterogeneous application and IT environments distributed throughout the enterprise, all with centralised management and visibility."

This would include content management sites and portals, collaboration and messaging applications - like Microsoft's SharePoint, databases, and service-oriented architecture-based applications.

Cisco said that by applying policy controls right onto the network it would simplify the provisioning of access rights. "As enterprises shift to service-orientated architectures and adopt technologies such as unified communications and Web 2.0 applications, there is a rising need for control over access to distributed enterprise resources," said Don Proctor senior vice president at Cisco's Collaboration Software Group. "Securent's software offers enterprises a single point of control to define and manage entitlements across applications and data."