IT management software vendor Novell today announced two new acquisitions designed to extend its identity and access management capabilities, and help customers to reduce cost, complexity and risk.

The first acquisition is compliance and privileged user management firm Fortefi. Novell plans to use the firm's Command Control and Compliance Auditor products to introduce the Novell Privileged User Manager in the second quarter of 2009.

The offering will provide granular access control and auditing of 'super' or 'root' users across multiple systems, as well as allowing the rapid enabling or disabling of administrator-level users across Unix and Linux systems.

Novell also announced that it has acquired a perpetual source code licence to ActivIdentity's single sign-on solution, SecureLogin.

Although the product has been available until now through an OEM agreement as Novell SecureLogin, the new deal will enable better integration of SecureLogin with Novell’s identity management solutions and faster addition of Novell customer requirements into future iterations of the product, said the firm.

“We’re excited about adding Fortefi’s privileged user management solutions to our portfolio and bringing SecureLogin technology, development, and support in-house,” said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager of identity and security at Novell.

“With these two moves, we continue our evolution to become the 'category-killer' for identity and security management. Our best-of-breed approach is both modular and integrated, to let customers address their specific problems with the flexibility to expand to the rest of their enterprise.”