Sensage

Sensage, Inc.
Type Private
Founded 2000
Headquarters Redwood City, California
Key people Joe Gottlieb, President and CEO

Cari Jaquet, Vice President, Marketing

Stacy Lovelace, Vice President, Finance and Legal

Eric Warner, Vice President, Sales

Rao Yendluri, Vice President, Engineering

Chris Berry, Vice President, Services and Support

Adam Sah, Founder and member of Board of Directors

Sensage Inc. is a privately held data warehouse software provider headquartered in Redwood City, California.[1] Sensage serves enterprises who use the software to capture and store event data so that it can be consolidated, searched and analyzed to generate reports that detect fraud, analyze performance trends, and comply with government regulations.[2][3]

Sensage competitors include traditional data warehouse vendors Oracle, Teradata and Netezza. In the security event and information management SIEM market, SenSage also competes with ArcSight, Assuria Log Manager, eIQNetworks, LogLogic, LogRhythm, NetIQ, NitroSecurity, Q1 Labs and Splunk.[4]

According to The451 Group, SenSage generates more than 70% of its revenue through global and local partners, which include EMC, HP, Cerner and McAfee.[4]

The company is backed by venture capital firms Sierra Ventures, Canaan Partners, Mitsui & Co. Venture Partners, FTVentures and Sand Hill Capital.[5]

Corporate history

Sensage Inc. was founded as Addamark Technologies Inc. in 2000. In October 2004, Addamark changed its name to Sensage and simultaneously announced version 3.0 of its flagship security information management product (SIM).[6]

Sensage’s financial backers include Sierra Ventures, Canaan Partners, Mitsui & Co. Venture Partners Inc., FTVentures and Sand Hill Capital.[7][8][9]

In October, 2012 Sensage was acquired by KEYW Corp. of Hanover, MD. On July 31, KEYW spun off a commercial products division, Hexis Cyber Solutions, Corp. Sensage's product relabeled as HawkEye AP (Analytics Platform) along with the Active Defense Grid product formerly known as Project G, now relabeled HawkEye G are the two primary products marketed by Hexis.[10][11]

Technology

The company uses a columnar database architecture instead of the relational database architecture that is more common in the industry.[12]

Sensage holds U.S. patent #7,024,414 for parsing table data into columns of values, formatting each column into a data stream, and transferring each data stream to a storage device in a continuous strip of data.[13] In this architecture, the data is stored in columns instead of rows, which eliminates the need for indices when storing event data to increase data compression and retrieval speeds.[12]

The event data warehouse software uses an extraction, transformation and loading tool to pull records into the data warehouse, where it is compressed and spread across server nodes. Data queries are distributed across data warehouse nodes as well.[12]

Sensage provides support for SAP, Oracle (PeopleSoft and Siebel), Lawson, Cerner and other packaged application providers, and its technology supports precise analytics needed for use cases, such as fraud detection.[14]

As its customers have shifted resources into cloud computing platforms, Sensage announced software that supports clustering and configuration in a VMware environment with hypervisor for using CPU cores, memory and other virtualized hardware resources.[15] The event data software includes support for storage virtualization, providing integration of SANs (storage area networks), NAS (network-attached storage) and CAS (content addressable storage) as online storage in a cloud-based or VMware environment.[15]

Products & Services

Sensage's products are built on its event data warehouse software that consolidates a complex stream of business transactions and communications from any network source, analyzes and stores the data, and gives users an interface to search through events from a single console. In 2008, Sensage added new user interface features to its software to make it usable by non-technical staff.[16]

Through much of its history, Sensage customers have used its event data warehouse software to analyze system logs for security information and event management (SIEM) to collect, store, manage and analyze log records for security and forensic purposes.[1][2][3][4][17][18] In a survey, Sensage customers reported the need to retain logs and archive archiving records for a minimum of one year as a hedge against future audits.[19] Sensage customer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida mentions using Sensage tools for proactive monitoring that allow administrators to see and prevent security threats as they occur.[20]

Sensage has OEM arrangements with HP (the HP Compliance Log Warehouse (CLW) appliance) and Cerner (healthcare applications).[14]HP uses Sensage software as the log management engine in the HP CLW, which is used by customers to collect and analyze log data to trigger compliance reporting for Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI and other federal record retention rules.[21][22] Customers such as Choice Hotels have deployed the HP CLW to automate network analysis and compliance reporting to meet Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) regulations.[23] More than 5,800 Choice brand hotels worldwide rely on the HP CLW to identify internal violations and external threats in real time.[23]

Sensage combines its event data warehouse software with EMC Centera long-term storage units to store, manage and analyze call detail records (CDRs) for telephone and wireless carriers and ISPs that must comply with the European Union Data Retention Directive.[2][4][24] The regulation was established to ensure service providers could assist law enforcement officials investigating bombings, leading to a requirement to keep records for up to three years.[4]

Telefónica O2 Ireland has deployed Sensage with EMC Centera storage hardware to meet the Data Retention Direction mandate, which requires storage and managing an average of 50 million CDRs per day.[25]

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 BusinessWeek. "Private Company Listing" retrieved August 20, 2009.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Robert Lemos, CIO.com "Another Data Center Headache: Log Data Exploding." April 29, 2009, retrieved September 2, 2009.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Brian Prince, eWeek "Sensage Focuses on Event Data to Make Mark in Data Warehouse Space." August 29, 2008, retrieved September 2, 2009.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Matt Aslett, The451 Group. "Sensage Shows Progress in Data Warehousing Thanks to Partner Focus." April 8, 2009, retrieved September 1, 2009.
  5. ↑ FTV Capital Press Release, “Sensage Raises $15 Million to Expand Event Data Warehouse Initiatives for the Enterprise.” June 10, 2008. Retrieved August 20, 2009
  6. ↑ WebHostingInfo. “Addamark Technologies Changes Name to Sensage.” October 18, 2004. Retrieved on August 20, 2009.
  7. ↑ Bonanos, Paul. “Dealflow: July 29, 2003”, The Deal, July 29, 2003, retrieved on September 22, 2008.
  8. ↑ Carlsen, Clifford. “Sensage taps Mitsui for $10M”, The Deal, April 18, 2005, retrieved on September 22, 2008.
  9. ↑ Dark Reading staff. “Sensage Raises $15M to Expand”, Dark Reading, June 10, 2008, retrieved on September 22, 2008.
  10. ↑ KEYW Press Release. ""
  11. ↑ KEYW/451 Research. ""
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Brian Prince, “Sensage Focuses on Event Data to Make Mark in Data Warehouse Space.” eWeek, August 29, 2008, retrieved on December 1, 2008.
  13. ↑ By Peter Bochner, SearchSAP.com. “SAP co-founder: Hardware Will Change the Way SAP Develops Software.” May 13, 2009. Retrieved August 20, 2009.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 US Patent & Trademark Office “QUERY HANDLING IN DATABASES WITH REPLICATED DATA.” Retrieved December 2, 2008.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 By Mark Nicolett and Kelly M. Kavanagh, Gartner. “Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management.” May 29, 2009. Retrieved August 21, 2009.
  16. ↑ James Powell, “Sensage Software Extracts Added Value from Event Log Data”, Enterprise Systems, April 3, 2008, retrieved on September 3, 2009
  17. ↑ By Brian Prince, eWeek. “Sensage Pushes Cloud-Based Event Data Warehouse.”July 15, 2009. Retrieved August 21, 2009
  18. ↑ By Eric Knorr, InfoWorld. “Dealing with the data explosion.” August 24, 2009. Retrieved August 25, 2009.
  19. ↑ By Tim Wilson, Dark Reading. “Enterprises Rolling on Logs.” Jan 28, 2008. Retrieved August 21, 2009.
  20. ↑ By Chris Gay, Best’s Review. “Button Up: Regulatory Compliance and Data Security Go Hand-in-Glove for Today's Security Professionals.” July 2009. Retrieved September 21, 2009.
  21. ↑ By Neil Roiter, SearchSecurity.com. “PCI Forces Companies to Seek Log Management Help.” April 24, 2008. Retrieved August 21, 2009
  22. ↑ By Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com. “HP Hopes For 'Secure Advantage'.” June 19, 2007. Retrieved August 21, 2009.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 CIO-Today.com. “Choice Hotels Selects HP Security Appliance.” March 18, 2009. Retrieved August 21, 2009.
  24. ↑ EMC Solution Gallery.“Sensage CDR Warehouse.” Retrieved August 25, 2009.
  25. ↑ By Philip Howard, Bloor Research. “Sensage at O2 Ireland.” April 2009.