You’re going to be hearing the name Tripwire a lot more, and the name nCircle a lot less probably. Tripwire announced today that it is acquiring nCircle—making it one of the biggest companies in information security.

The combined company will be a powerhouse in the security industry. Combined, Tripwire and nCircle have over 500 employees and 7,000 customers spanning 96 countries around the globe. Their combined revenue in 2012 was about $ 140 million. The new company will rank as a competitor for McAfee, Symantec, EMC, and others in the security and vulnerability management arena.

Tripwire isn’t a household name like Symantec or McAfee, but it’s known and respected in information security circles, and it boasts nearly half of the Fortune 500 as clients. The company has been around for over a decade, and initially made its mark with a file integrity product that alerts IT admins when critical files have been altered—a possible sign of exploit or malware attacks. Tripwire has products for identifying and remediating file and configuration changes, and for logging and correlating security events.

Meanwhile, nCircle has established itself as a key player for compliance and risk management. Its nCircle Purecloud service provides clients with a cloud-based, automated vulnerability management tool, and nCircle Benchmark enables CISOs to measure the security performance, and gather relevant, real-world metrics they need to build a business case for new security initiatives.

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