Whoa, that’s a lot of tokens. Is the price justified? I must have been asleep when this happened, or at least no one has made much noise about it. The past few token systems I’ve planned or managed on haven’t touched RSA, so maybe I was just out of the loop. Anyhow, apologies for the delay, but here it is:

…the world’s biggest maker of data storage equipment and software, on Thursday unveiled its latest acquisition when it agreed to pay $2.1bn in cash for RSA Security …

In a statement on Thursday, Joe Tucci, EMC chief executive, said: “Information security is a top priority among executives around the world, and it has become an inseparable attribute of information management.”

Correct, the attribute of security is inseparable from information, but that is a bit like saying the attribute of safety is inseparable from automobiles. I could make an analogy to financial risk instead of cars, but that might get confused with another top priority among executives around the world:

RSA earlier this month revealed that it was one of several dozen companies that had received a subpoena from the US attorney’s office related to stock options grants.

The acquisition seems to be aimed at the “secure storage” sector that Symantec-Veritas was supposed to be leading. Yet, these giants are so sloth-like and pricey when it comes to delivering solutions that I believe we really need a visonary or a start-up like StrongAuth to move things along. In fact, I suspect secure storage hosted solutions via big content providers will be more likely to catch on than direct-to-consumer products, so a big challenge for EMC will be getting buy-in from highly technical decision-makers who (should) push for thin margins and easy interop. Then again, if the buy-outs continue and competition stagnates at the enterprise level, Apple’s new archive product could prove to motivate the consumer secure storage market first.