In the beginning of March 1999 Aladdin Knowledge Systems acquired an Israeli company, Micro Macro Technologies. The merge of the two companies will make it easier for PC and Macintosh software developers to look for and choose suitable tools for preventing the illegal use of their product. The agreement is especially important as the popularity of new colorful iMacs grows and the number of programs written for it is increasing. Using its own MacHASP USB dongle as an example Aladdin noted the growth of demand for dongles that protect Mac applications.
Micro Macro has been famous for a long time for its MicroGuard dongle series for Macintosh, PC and NEC computers. Among these, MicroGuard Plus is the most popular dongle, used with Macintosh software. At the core of this dongle is a powerful microcontroller, implementing a three-layer protection mechanism.
Micro Macro was founded in 1995. During three years their sales reached $1'4M and now the company owns the market share of 60% of dongles for Machintosh computers. Among its clients are Agfa, Adobe, Kodak, Fuji. Micro Macro is among four leading companies, manufacturing USB dongles:
Functional features of the new USB bus allows the USB dongles to add to their function of software protection and become a means of user identity authentification. A combination of these two functions has already been implemented by Aladdin-developed eToken device. Up to this moment in Russia there were only two types of USB dongles, HASP and HardLock (Aladdin) and Sentinel (Rainbow). Now Aladdin clients will get a new type of USB dongles - MicroGuard.
The merge of Aladdin and Micro Macro with its experience in protecting Macintosh software, as well as the previous deal of Aladdin, concerning the acquisition of eSafe, which was offering security solutions for "computer - gateway" systems, will make it possible to create integrated ways of software, database and Internet-resources protection. New technologies can be used with differents sales methods, e.g. for e-commerce or Internet subscription services.
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