The New England Patriots recently clinched the AFC East Division Championship for the ninth time out of the past ten years. FC Barcelona hoisted five out of the past ten La Liga Championship trophies. The Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers have won 33 out of the 63 NBA Championships played since 1947.

Several of the factors that impact the success of a sports franchise also apply to various segments of the business world and in IT Security as well:

• Strength of the brand - Let’s face it: the Celtics are the Celtics…the Yankees are the Yankees. Everyone wants to beat the Celtics and the Yankees, it brings out the best in their opponents. This raises the overall game for both teams in addition to instilling life long loyalty of their fan base.
• Executing to the strategy - The West Coast Offense of the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s and the Tiki-taka style of Barcelona are great examples of innovating and executing a winning strategy that have resulted in a decade or more of success as well as changed the state of play in their respective sports.
• Quality of players -  Messi, Brady, Kobe. It always helps to have great players, but success typically breeds greater success. Talent wants to compete in organizations that win.

The acquisition of Silver Tail Systems is a great opportunity to extend RSA’s strengths in these three areas: both companies are passionate about brand, strategic execution, and quality of “players.” We believe that the evolving nature of online threats requires a new approach that the combined portfolio of RSA and Silver Tail can uniquely address. Web session intelligence and behavioral analysis coupled with the authentication and transaction monitoring capabilities offer a new approach to securing the web. Additionally, Silver Tail’s core technologies of data science and security intelligence are synergistic across many other groups and product families within RSA.

The key to maximizing this opportunity is focus. We must focus on the things that brought both companies to this point: brand leadership, strategic execution and quality of the “players.” This week marks the official close of the acquisition of Silver Tail by EMC, yet it also marks the opening of a new chapter for RSA and EMC to extend our ability to protect customers and ultimately restore integrity to the Internet. On behalf of the Silver Tail Systems employees, we couldn’t be more excited for what the future holds…we are ready to get on the pitch with our new teammates to compete for a safer internet.