With McAfee buying data-loss-prevention vendor Reconnex for US$46 million in cash, the question now is how will McAfee move forward in the future to bring the Reconnex product suite into its portfolio, especially with the overlap in DLP products between the two?

Mike Siegel, director of product marketing at McAfee, says the strategy is to phase out the host-based DLP that's

available from Reconnex, which is OEMed from rival Trend Micro, and integrate the McAfee product host-based DLP in its place as the Reconnex product is evolved by McAfee.

In addition, McAfee is officially phasing out the DLP Gateway it introduced last year, and plans to integrate the Reconnex iGuard gateway to work with the McAfee management console, ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO).

McAfee acknowledges it had no significant customer base for its DLP Gateway.

The Reconnex acquisition is expected to be concluded in the third quarter of this year, and shortly thereafter McAfee will begin a phased integration of the Reconnex gear to work under the ePO management umbrella. While no specific time frame has been announced, the expectation is that within a few months there will be sharing of incidents data between management consoles.