Linux Magazine’s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008
Who knows what the future will hold? Well, heaven knows we don’t or we’d have already won the lottery a few times and retired to a private island somewhere. However, we can look at the past to make a few reasonable predictions– such as the companies in the free and open source software community that are going to have a major impact on the market in 2008.
Can’t we all just get along? That’s the hope of most IT administrators. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X are inevitable components of most IT environments, and anything that fosters interoperability is going to be a hot technology.
Centrify just happens to sell a solution along those lines. Centrify DirectControl integrates non-Microsoft systems with Microsoft’s Active Directory. Like it or loathe it, Active Directory isn’t going anywhere. Companies that have spent the money to deploy Active Directory are likely to stick with it, so DirectControl provides the glue between the systems.
The company also offers an auditing solution, DirectAudit, to help with troubleshooting and auditing of user sessions on Linux and other* nix systems. We find this a bit less compelling than its DirectControl product, but it’s probably a draw for companies that have to worry about Sarbanes-Oxley and other fun compliance requirements.
As Linux continues to infiltrate the enterprise, we expect to hear more about Centrify in the coming year.