Posts Tagged ‘a16z’
Everlaw
AJ Shankar was busy working on his PhD thesis at the University of California, Berkeley in the prestigious Programming Systems Lab, where he published a number of important papers in OOPSLA and PLDI. As a big fan of side projects, he also caught the maker bug.
One of those projects was working as a technical expert for a leading Seattle-based law firm. It led AJ to ask what every entrepreneur asks, “How can this be improved with software?” That’s where Everlaw got started, in 2011.
The problem: A world of legacy software for lawyers
The legal profession — particularly the area of litigation and trials — is a costly, complex, labor-intensive, and, frankly, error-prone process. Beyond that, it is steeped in the complexities of individual courts and jurisdictions dictating, sometimes at the trial level, how technology can be used. Having personally worked through the transition from WordPerfect to Windows over the better part of a decade, I know the challenges of bringing technology to this highly knowledge- and people-intensive process are significant.
AJ and his co-founder, practicing lawyer Jeff Friedman, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and corporate counsel, know these challenges well from their experiences. They set out to invent something that meets both the demanding technical needs of litigation along with the unique business requirements of law firms, which often do not have the resources or skills required to manage complex software deployments.
In fact, complex deployments of on-premises software defines the current state-of-the-art in litigation support software. Anyone familiar with modern software would look at this “state-of-the-art” and see architecture from another era. That’s not to say those solutions do not provide value and make money, but AJ and Jeff see a far better way.
There is also a need for modern solutions to deeply technical problems — such as searching terabyte corpora for relevant documents (the state-of-the-art is mostly keyword search) or identifying clusters of relevant documents based on machine learning techniques (versus relying on humans to manually sift through and connect millions of documents). Historically, an industry vertical with such a legacy business model and architecture (i.e., very slow to change) would have a very hard time attracting top computer science talent to improve the space.
Law firms also need software to solve the modern problem of “big data.” In this context, big data can mean millions of email messages, chat transcripts, voice mail recordings, scanned documents, entire data sets and social media feeds, and much more. Those are the artifacts of the legal discovery process that flow across both sides of the aisle in ever-increasing volumes. These volumes are beyond what many law firms can deal with, and as some might know, producing large amounts of data can often be part of a legal strategy used against smaller firms.
Finally, the pace of change for software in the litigation industry needs to increase. The model of one-time, slowly updated on-premises software simply isn’t compatible with the fast-paced changes in technologies that can help legal. Part of the legacy world the legal profession faces is the same that any enterprise faces: A desire to move away from high, up-front product costs and transition to a cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
The solution: Bringing cloud innovation to lawyers
Everlaw architected a solution that starts from customers: attorneys at small firms, large firms, state offices, and on both the defense and plaintiff side of cases. AJ’s technical background and Jeff’s real-world experience as an attorney proved to be a great place to start. To begin the journey, Everlaw assembled an engineering team of hard-core computer scientists, many from UC Berkeley.
In the Andreessen Horowitz pitch meeting, it turns out a lot of the former CEOs, execs, and founders have been involved in litigation. Our collective experience, especially as defendants, led to an immediate bond with AJ as he detailed the Everlaw solution. Many of us have been through the boxes of documents and questions from counsel about “discovered” documents. We knew how difficult the process was and we loved when AJ detailed Everlaw’s approach:
- Bring together core computer science experts from natural language, machine learning, and full-stack development to architect the system.
- Build innovative experiences that start with the process of ediscovery and provide a platform for an end-to-end solution for attorneys to collaborate as a case is developed.
- Deliver Everlaw as an incredibly secure, highly reliable, totally scaleable cloud-based SaaS service.
So far, their experience with customers has been amazing. Since most attorneys are part of the world of mobile and cloud experiences, as soon as they see Everlaw, they see how much easier, faster, and higher quality their trial preparation and work can be. In fact, customers usually say “why did it take so long” or “this is how it should work”. AJ has written a postthat includes more details on the company’s vision and the success to date.
At Andreessen Horowitz, we are always incredibly excited to see technology founders taking on the hard work of reimagining an industry. It is clear that mobile, machine learning, and cloud delivered via SaaS will revolutionize every vertical, including legal. We love the work that AJ, Jeff and the Everlaw team have done to bring such high-powered efforts to an incredibly important part of the economy.
For those reasons, we could not be more excited to be partnering with Everlaw and leading their Series A funding round, joining the existing investors. I am super excited to be joining the Everlaw board to support their ongoing work. Software eats legal.
This post originally appeared on a16z.com
More Tanium Magic
For a just over a year, Tanium Corporation has been impressing enterprise customers with its special brand of Tanium magic — the ability to instantly learn anything you need to know about the PCs, servers, VMs, and embedded devices such as ATMs and Point of Sale devices on your network. About nine months ago Andreessen Horowitz was offered the opportunity to partner with Tanium and the founders David and Orion Hindawi, and we could not be more impressed with the progress and growth of the company. This week Tanium is adding some more magic to an amazing product.
Growing and Scaling
The Tanium team has been hard at work on the platform and in creating a great company. It is worth sharing a little bit about the progress they have made in less than a year:
- Tanium is deployed on over 10,000,000 endpoints, with individual customers managing hundreds of thousands of endpoints.
- Tanium is in broad deployment in over half the Fortune 100.
- Tanium is rapidly growing (and hiring) with a particular focus on expanding internationally.
- Even with growth on every metric, Tanium has stayed a cash-generating and profitable business.
Tanium’s product magic is matched by the team’s amazing leadership and execution.
Reimagining Systems Management and Endpoint Security
When customers first see Tanium, they are blown away by the speed at which IT can learn what is going on with the endpoints on the network. Tanium’s capability to navigate, interrogate, and act on even the largest enterprise network in seconds is the magic that fires up customers –networks comprised of millions of endpoints made up of PCs, Servers, VMs, and embedded devices. This 15-second capability is the foundation of Tanium magic and is unprecedented for large scale environments.
Traditionally, enterprises deploy Systems Management (SM) platforms to control their environments. Prior to Tanium, even the state-of-the-art tools require immense investment in agents, logon scripts, policies, signature files, databases, dedicated infrastructure (servers and networking), and more, just to provide base level information. These tools frustrate end-users and CIOs alike by choking endpoints, burdening networks, and offering up information that is approximate at best and at worse irrelevant, because it is outdated.
Tanium surpasses the state-of-the-art in systems management, which you’d expect from founders whose previous company built the leading tools of this generation before being acquired by IBM. Not content to stop there, Tanium’s ambition is much greater than improving on their previous solution, even if it is already “10,000 times better.”
That ambition is based on an important observation regarding today’s challenges in enterprise security, particularly the realities faced by the nature of attacks. Malicious attacks are no longer brute force attempts to penetrate the network firewall or simply blunt viruses or malware that indiscriminately seize endpoints. We’re all aware that today’s attacks are multi-step, socially enabled or engineered, and by definition circumvent network-based and traditional end-point protection. We’ve seen that in all the recent breaches across Target, Home Depot, JP Morgan, Sony and more, including Anthem most recently.
In every case, once a breach becomes known, the most critical job of the security team is to scope the breach, identify compromised endpoints, and shut them down. Traditionally security teams relied on network-based management solutions since those have the fastest and most familiar tools. In practice, quickly identifying all the endpoints with an unpatched OpenSSL version or all that match a known indication of compromise, for example, look much less like network security efforts and more like endpoint challenges, historically the domain of systems management. The problem is that systems management tools were designed for an era when most of their work took place logging on or during off-hours “sweeps” of assets, with results gathered over the course of weeks.
CIOs recognize that having a systems management team using one set of tools that can barely keep up with traditional demands and having a security team using tools that are only focused on the network edge isn’t ideal by any measure. Systems management is now an integral part of incident detection and response. Conversely, security and protection require full knowledge and control of end-points. Neither set of existing tools deployed in most environments is up to the task.
Tanium has been working with customers from the CIO and CISO and throughout the management and response teams in enterprises to deploy Tanium as a frontline and first response platform that reimagines the traditional categories of systems management and endpoint security. In a world of unprecedented security risks, BYO devices, and ever-changing software needs nothing short of a rethinking of the tools and approaches is required.
Tanium is a new generation of security and systems management capabilities that meets two modern criteria:
- Provide 15-second information on all endpoints. Open your browser, type in a natural language query, and know instantly every endpoint that meets a particular criteria or indication of compromise, IOC, (for example, running a certain process, recently modified system state matching a pattern, particular network traffic, or literally anything you can imagine asking the endpoint). Aside from instant information, the key new capability is being able to learn about any aspect of the running system even if it is something unforeseen or unplanned. Results are real-time, live, and refreshable instantly.
- Remedy problematic situations immediately. Given the set of endpoints matching the criteria, take action immediately by shutting down endpoints, modifying the system configurations, quarantining devices, alerting users, or patching the appropriate modules, all in seconds rather than days. Aside from being able to immediately deploy the remedy, the key new capability is being able to implement any possible remedy across all endpoints, even within the largest networks in the world using minimal infrastructure.
The most innovative products are those that provide new ways of thinking about problems or new approaches that break down the traditional category boundaries. Tanium is such a platform, and that is why enterprises are so enthusiastic about what Tanium provides.
Shipping New Capabilities
This week Tanium is releasing some significant new capabilities that further the vision of a new category of product that serves the needs of both systems management and security professionals.
Tanium IOC Detect. Open to a wide variety of highly-regarded third-party threat intelligence data and indicators of compromise templates, Tanium takes this data and continuously seeks to identify endpoints at risk in real-time. Tanium is able to match the widest possible range of system attributes and patterns without downloading client-side databases or signature files. Security operations no longer needs to sift through all of the intelligence feeds manually or script signatures to feed into legacy systems management tools. Instead, Tanium makes it possible to detect and remediate threats immediately at massive scale.
Tanium Patch. Tanium transforms a process that’s error-prone and time-consuming with the ability to deploy patches across hundreds of thousands of endpoints in seconds, with 99%+ reliability and no scripting required by the IT team. Using two of Tanium’s key architectural elements, the communications layer and the data transport layer, patches are deployed and installed with unprecedented speed and unrivaled minimal impact on network infrastructure. Since many security breaches require updates to endpoints to truly remedy them, Tanium brings together the needs of both security and management processes.
Tanium Connect. Tanium integrates its 15-second data into third-party security and management tools to make those tools more accurate and actionable. For example, Tanium’s ability to quickly see anomalies on endpoints can be used to create alerts in security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Traditionally this data would be impossible to collect or would be routed through existing systems management infrastructures, which are labor intensive and high-latency data sources. Tanium Connect provides the security operations data required to ascertain the threat and, because the data is only seconds old, the team knows it is worthy of investigation.
These are just a few of the improvements to Tanium’s 6.5 platform available this week.
Looking Forward
Tanium’s magic innovation uniquely positions the company at the modern crossroads of systems management and security tools. Tanium’s platform reimagines these categories, while seamlessly working with existing infrastructure, and adds a new level of value and capability to forward-leaning IT teams.
Given this superb team, amazing growth, and unparalleled innovation, we could not be more happy than to lead a new round of investment in this wonderful company. Andreessen Horowitz is incredibly excited to be partnering with David, Orion, and the Tanium team, and I could not be more thrilled with continued service on Tanium’s Board of Directors.
Note: This post also appeared on http://a16z.com/blog.
Product Hunt: A Passion for Products, the Makers Behind Them, and the Community Around Them
More products are being created and developed faster today than ever before. Every day new services, sites, and apps are introduced. But with this surge in products, it’s become more difficult to get noticed and connect with users. In late 2013, Ryan Hoover founded Product Hunt to provide a daily view of new products that brings together an engaged community of product users with product makers. Today marks the next step in the growth of the company.
Interconnecting a Community
When you first meet Ryan it becomes immediately clear he has a passion for entrepreneurship and its surrounding ecosystem. Well before starting Product Hunt, he hosted intimate brunches to bring founders together. This came out of another email-based experiment named Startup Edition, where he assembled a weekly newsletter of founder essays on topics of marketing, product development, fundraising, and other challenges company builders face. This enthusiasm is prevalent on Twitter where he shares new products and regularly interacts with fellow enthusiasts in the startup community.
Ryan’s background comes from games, an ecosystem that is regarded as one of the most connected. Gamers love to stay on top of the latest products. Game makers love to connect with gamers. There’s an even larger community of game enthusiasts who value being observers in this dialog. Ryan grew up in the midst of a family-owned video game store so it’s no surprise that he has an incredibly strong sense of community. That’s why after college, he got involved in the gaming industry, first at InstantAction and then at PlayHaven. Each of these roles allowed Ryan to build the skills to foster both the product and community engagement sides of gaming, while also creating successful business opportunities for the whole community.
Spending time in the heart of gaming, between gamers and game makers, Ryan saw how those makers that fostered a strong sense of community around their game had stronger engagement and improved chances of future growth. Along the way he saw a wide variety of ways to build communities — and most importantly to maintain an open and constructive environment where praise, criticism, and wishes could be discussed between makers and enthusiasts.
About a year ago, Ryan launched, in his words, “an experiment” — a daily email of the latest products. After a short time, interest and subscribers to the mail list grew. So with a lot of hustle, the email list turned into a site. Product Hunt was launched.
Product Hunt started with a passion for products and has grown into a community of people passionate to explore and discuss new products with likeminded enthusiasts and makers of those products.
Product Hunt: More Than a Site
Product Hunt has become something of a habit for many since its debut. Today hundreds of thousands of “product hunters” visit the site plus more through the mobile apps, the daily email, and the platform API. Every month, millions of visits to product trial, app stores, and download sites are generated. And nearly half of all product discussions include the product maker, from independent hackers to high-profile veteran founders.
Product Hunt is used by enthusiasts to learn about new products, colored with an unfiltered conversation with its makers. It servers the industry as a source for new and trending product areas. For many, Product Hunt is or will evolve to be the place you go to discover products in the context of similar products along with a useful dialog with a community.
Product Hunt is much more than a site. Product Hunt is a community. In fact, Ryan and the team spend most of their energy creating, curating, and crafting a unique approach to building a community. His own experience as a participant and a maker led him to believe deeply in the role of community and engagement not just in building products, but also in launching new products and connecting with customers.
This led the team to create a platform for products, starting with the products they know best — mobile and desktop apps and sites.
The challenge they see is that today’s internet and app stores are overwhelmed with new products, as we all know. The stores limit interaction to one-way communication and reviews. If you want to connect with the product makers, there’s no way to do so. Ironically, makers themselves are anxious to connect but do so in an ad hoc manner that often lacks the context of the product or community. Product Hunt allows this type of community to be a normal part of interaction and not just limited to tech products.
Product Hunt is just getting started, but the enthusiasm is incredible. A quick Twitter search for “addicted to product hunt” shows in just a short time how many folks are making the search for what’s new a part of a routine. The morning email with the latest news is now a must-read and Ryan is seeing the technology industry use this as a source for the most up to date launches.
Product Hunt’s uniqueness comes from the full breadth of activity around new products and those enthusiastic about them:
Launch. Product Hunt is a place where products are announced and discovered for the first time. Most new products today don’t start with marketing or advertising, but simply “show up”. Makers know how hard it is to get noticed. They upload an app to a store or set up a new site and just wait. Gaining awareness or traction is challenging. Since the first people to use most new products are themselves involved in making products, they love to know about and experience the latest creations. New product links come from a variety of sources and already Product Hunt is becoming the go-to place for early adopters.
Learn. Learning about what’s new is just as challenging for enthusiasts. Most new products launched do not yet have full-blown marketing, white papers, or other information. In fact, in today’s world of launching-to-learn more about how to refine products, there are often more questions than answers. Community members submit just a short tagline and link to the product. Then the dialog begins. There are robust discussions around choices in the product, comparisons to other products, and more. Nearly half of the products include the makers in the discussion, sharing their stories and directly interacting with people. And these discussions are also happening in the real world, as members of the community organize meetups across the globe from Tokyo to Canada.
Share. Early adopters love to share their opinions and engage with others. On Product Hunt, the people determine which products surface as enthusiasts upvote their favorite discoveries and share their perspective in the comments. Openness, authenticity, and constructive sharing are all part of the Product Hunt experience, and naturally this enthusiasm spills outside the community itself.
Curate. With the help of the community, the team is constantly curating collections of products into themes that are dynamic and changing. This helps raise awareness of emerging product categories and gives consumers a way to find great products for specific needs. Recent lists have included GIF apps, tools used by product managers, and productivity apps. One favorite that shows the timeliness of Product Hunt was a list of iOS 8 keyboards the day after iOS 8’s launch.
One attribute of all products that serve an enthusiastic community is the availability of a platform to extend and customize the product. Product Hunt recently announced the Product Hunt API and already has apps and services that present useful information gathered from Product Hunt, such as the leaderboard and analytics platform.
Product Hunt + a16z
When I first hung out with Ryan outside of a conference room, he brought me to The Grove coffee shop on Mission St. We sat outside and began to talk about products, enthusiasts, and community. It was immediately clear Ryan sees the world or products in a unique way — he sees a world of innovation, openness to new ideas, and unfiltered communication between makers and consumers. As founder, Ryan embodies the mission-oriented founders a16z loves to work with and he’s built a team that shares that passion and mission.
Andreessen Horowitz could not be more excited to lead this next round of investing, and I am thrilled to serve on the board. Please check out Product Hunt for yourself onthe web, download its iOS app, or sign up for the email digest.
–Steven Sinofsky
Note: This post originally appeared on a16z.com.
Tanium Magic
Lightning doesn’t often strike twice, but in the case of the father and son team of David and Orion Hindawi, founders of Tanium, Inc., that’s exactly what has happened. Tanium is a prime example of a modern enterprise software company—solving the new generation of today’s problems using skills and experience gained from being successful founders in the previous generation.
Forming the company
David Hindawi, a PhD in Operations Research from UC Berkeley is an entrepreneur who led the creation of several successful companies through the earliest days of the PC era. His early efforts focused on getting PCs connected to the “net” and keeping them running smoothly.
In 1997, David teamed up with his son Orion, then an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, to form BigFix. BigFix solved the problem of communicating with all the end-points (PCs, servers, virtual machines, and more) on enterprise networks to gather configuration data and deploy product updates. BigFix was a remarkable product for the time routinely scaling to 100,000 end-points. In 2010, IBM acquired BigFix and integrated it into the Tivoli Software portfolio marking a successful exit.
Some might have been content to rest on their collective laurels having invented the technology, built a company, and scaled a business to the most elite of enterprise success stories. Instead, David, Orion and the key architects of BigFix had an even bigger idea.
Forming Tanium came about as the team reflected on these product shortcomings. “We recognized that enterprises needed endpoint control that was much faster than they could get with existing tools, and challenged ourselves to leapfrog the state of the art, including BigFix, where basic management queries could take days.” Orion recounted, “We knew that nothing short of a 10,000 times speed improvement over the state of the art at the time would solve the problem, and we needed to fundamentally change the paradigm of systems management and end-point security to accomplish that. We are lucky to have one of the few engineering teams in enterprise management who are smart and ambitious enough to do that”.
The team, mostly members of the original BigFix engineering group and all experts with years of experience in large enterprise management, worked in their Berkeley, CA offices for almost two years before the first customers saw the early results of their new product. When seeing the product in action, it was clear to early customers that the team had in fact built a better mousetrap. Tanium was born.
Meeting Tanium @ a16z
When Orion first came to Andreessen Horowitz to meet us and introduce Tanium we had no idea what a surprise we were going to see. Collectively we are many old hands at systems management and security. Many folks at a16z share the experience of having built Opsware and my own experience at Microsoft make for an informed, and perhaps tough, audience.
Orion popped open his laptop, clicked a bookmark and navigated to Tanium’s web-based “console”. At the top of the screen, we saw a single edit control like you’d see for a search engine. He started typing in natural language questions such as “show computers where CPU > 75%” and “show computers with a process named WINWORD.EXE”. Within seconds, just like using search, a list of computers scrolled by as though it was just an existing spreadsheet or report. At this point we reached the only reasonable conclusion—Orion was showing us a simulation of the product they hoped to build.
After all, we were all quite familiar with the state of the art for this type of telemetry (BigFix in particular represented the state of the art) and we knew that what we were seeing was just not possible.
But, the demonstration was not a simulation or edited screen capture. In fact, Tanium was running on a full scale deployment of thousands of end-points. This wasn’t even a demo scenario, but a live, production deployment—the magic of Tanium. As we learned more about Tanium and how it easily scales to 500,000 end-points (not theoretically, but in practice) and the breadth of capabilities, we were more than intrigued. We were determined to do what we could to invest in David, Orion, and team.
Redefining State of the Art
In enterprises, one team is generally responsible for securing end-points, while another is responsible for managing them (systems management). Typically, each team uses its own tools, and each is independently struggling to keep pace with modern network security threats and the scale of modern networks.
Today’s IT Pros on both security and management teams know the types of information they need from their network. With current tools these questions require careful planning, significant infrastructure, and a fine balance between what IT needs to know and the cost to the end user who is working on the computers that are being queried – if you get it wrong, you can cause slow logons and sluggish performance at inconvenient times. However, to effectively manage and secure networks and provide assurance of compliance with government and industry regulations IT Pros absolutely require information such as hardware configuration, software inventory, network usage, patch and update status, and more. In addition, today’s socially engineered security risks are often combinations of seemingly simple combinations of running programs, files or attachments on the system, and a few other clues. An IT Pro walking up to a PC or Mac could easily obtain all of this information, but for all practical purposes it is impossible for them to gather that data from the thousands of end-points they are responsible for with any level of ease or timeliness.
Getting that data at scale is typically hard and slow because almost every Systems Management tool uses a classic hub (servers) and spoke (end-points) architecture. IT Pros deploy multiple servers running on network segments with high-end databases and significant networking hardware combined with fairly elaborate end-point runtimes. Even when this state of the art deployment is carefully tuned, the best case at very large scales can be 3 days to “compute” the answer to critical operational questions, assuming you knew ahead of time you were going to ask those questions. By this time the information would be out of date and by then the whole problem you were thinking about has probably changed. As a result most IT Pros know that best case the data is approximate, and worst case just worthless. For mission critical problems, such as compliance with HIPAA (healthcare) or PCI (electronic payment) regulations, this is more than just inconvenient for IT, it can cause a painful failure with board-level visibility.
The state of the art for Security is all about building stronger and taller walls between the enterprise network and the internet. We’re familiar with these approaches across the basics of firewalls, more sophisticated security appliances and adaptive architectures, and of course the typical security suites that run on end-points. Unfortunately, the bad guys are wise to that game, and modern threats are created anticipating that these protections are in place—in many cases, the bad guys actually “QA” their attacks against the systems enterprises use before they release them. In addition, today’s malware is targeted to particular organizations, and is often put in place by a series of seemingly benign or undetectable actions. Malware, a bot, or a backdoor make their way onto the network leaving behind a series of benign clues—a running process, a changed file, a memory signature, or a specific network packet. It is only taken together that a pattern emerges. It is only after the fact or with an IOC (indicator of compromise) in hand that IT Pros can potentially track down end-points that have been compromised. Unfortunately, IT is literally swamped by IOCs to investigate and there are no effective tools that support this wide range of questions and even if you could, the state of the art would give answers in days, long after the damage was done.
Even with these challenges, both of these state of the art approaches have their place in a modern network. It would be irresponsible to run a network without basic asset management or network firewalls and end-point protection such as anti-virus. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of both threats and systems management, the needs of IT Pros are far more dynamic and complex than existing systems can provide. This is the opportunity where Tanium adds unique value to the tools of the modern IT and Security professional.
At 16z, we love the opportunity to partner with enterprise companies that are either working to radically improve the way a given IT need is met with software or transforming the IT landscape by re-creating or re-defining the traditional categories with unique software. Tanium is magical because it is transformative across both of those measures.
Innovating Tanium
In practice, the Tanium team accomplished nothing short of a complete rethinking of how IT Pros manage, secure, and maintain the end-points in their network—every node on the network can now be interrogated, managed, updated, and secured, instantly from a browser. Literally, you can ask almost anything of an end-point from basics such as configuration, patch status, software inventory compliance, performance, reliability measures, telemetry, network activity, files, and more (basically anything you can ask of a running system) and get answers back in seconds. Not only can you ask questions, but you can take actions as well—distribute and install updates, shut down processes or executables, remove or quarantine files, and so on. All of this happens in seconds, across your entire network of end-points, across LAN segments and the WAN, from branch offices to headquarters to the data center.
Orion walked us through the magic of Tanium. It became clear very quickly that David, Orion and team have invented a completely new way to think about managing and securing a network of computers. The magic of Tanium is built out of four innovative technology pillars:
- Runtime. The Tanium runtime builds on the end-point management lessons of BigFix. The runtime serves as the platform for asking the end-point questions in the scripting language of your choice (VBscript, Powershell, WMI, Python, Unix Shell, and most any other language), packaging up the answers and getting them to single server/VM that coordinates the activities. The runtime also provides actions allowing you to make changes across your entire network, instantly. The end-point runtime is a couple megabytes, takes almost no CPU or RAM, and incurs nearly imperceptible network usage.
- LP2P Networking: End-points secured by Tanium do not drive up costly WAN traffic but instead communicate between end-points on the local area network. Expensive WAN load is vastly reduced because rather than all end-points trying to reach a single data center across the WAN, answers and actions are coordinated across an incredibly efficient linear peer-to-peer (LP2P) architecture—an innovative hybrid of mesh and peer-to-peer concepts designed and validated for the enterprise. LP2P is self-healing and architected for fault tolerance, transient end-points, and global WAN segments connected in a typical manner.
- Natural Language. The interface to Tanium is through a simple text box where you can use natural language to ask questions of the entire set of end-points. Just like using web search, each question gives you suggestions for follow up questions, refinements, and ways to improve your queries. You use natural language questions to generate tables, charts, time series, and other representations of your near real-time network status—instantly.
- Security. The entire Tanium platform was of course architected from the ground up to be secure enough for the largest enterprise and federal networks – Tanium affords IT Pros incredible power and flexibility in managing and securing end-points, and they recognize the need to ensure that power stays in the right hands. As a result, all traffic is FIPS level secured, actions are controlled and validated by signed certificates, and administrators have fine-grained control over the types of queries and actions permitted by different users within IT.
If you’re running existing state of the art tools for managing and securing your end-points, you have a fixed set of diagnostic questions that you routinely ask and then store the answers in a database for later analysis. Even if it’s a simple question like what version of OS software your computers are running, it will take a few days or more to get answers. If you have a crisis requiring new information, you likely push out an emergency logon script or dreaded background process to add a new question to the list of slowly collected answers, and days later you know the approximate answer.
As a result of the innovations above, Tanium completely upends the thinking about how this should work. By analogy, if you think about the current state of the art as a printed set of classic encyclopedias then Tanium is like having the entire internet at your disposal through a search engine. Rather than a set of fixed questions and answers, you use Tanium to explore your end-points. When new security threats arise you can immediately explore your risk by using any telemetry to diagnose your risk and then using any mechanism to take corrective actions—instantly.
A top of mind example for all of us is the outbreak of Heartbleed. As soon as your operations center received notice of this vulnerability, there was one simple question “what variants and versions of OpenSSL are we running across all servers and VMs”. Almost no management and inventory system would have this readily available. Many would have first relied on what was believed to the “standard” images, but later would find out that isn’t enough. With Tanium, you just ask a question in natural language and within seconds you can have any level of details required on the servers and VMs running OpenSSL. You can then shut those servers down, deploy updates, or monitor actions—instantly.
Identifying and securing end-points for compliance with regulations, software licensing, or corporate policy is equally simple. When talking to Orion about Tanium, I searched my own experience for what I thought was a trick question. I wanted to know “how many end-points had attached USB memory stick and written to it recently” (a potential information leak, compliance issue, or malware vector all in one simple and common operation). Once again Tanium’s magic delivered an answer from a natural language query in just a few seconds for thousands of computers.
In addition to all of this, Tanium is also a true platform. IT Pros can utilize mature REST, SOAP, and syslog APIs to connect the results of Tanium queries to their favorite big data destination and develop time series models of their end-points, and mine the data for patterns. Because the Tanium runtime has such a minimal impact it is possible to collect thousands of independent data points continuously from hundreds of thousands of end-points, feeding the predictive analytics and big data systems that enterprises are building today with extremely valuable data. This type of analysis allows for finding points in time when the network changed, identifying malware, bots, and other exploits that we all know escape traditional firewalls and anti-virus. Using the platform, IT can also create tailored dashboards and custom actions that enable monitoring and guarantee compliance of end-points with standards.
Tanium and a16z
I could go on and on about the magic of Tanium that David, Orion, and the amazing team created. In fact when we talk about Tanium we describe it as an entrepreneur trifecta. First, David and Orion are experienced and successful entrepreneurs. Second, Tanium is a product that builds on innovative and inventive technology that could only come about from a team with years of experience and a depth of understanding of the enterprise. And third, Tanium is already a successful and profitable company with dozens of customers in massive, mission-critical and global deployments.
With this incredible story, Andreessen Horowitz could not be more excited to be leading an investment in Tanium. I’m personally super excited to be joining the Tanium Board where I will work closely with David, Orion, and the team.
–Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi, steven@a16z.com)
This post is also on a16z.
Bringing the shared economy to the enterprise
In much of the world’s urban areas, it can seem like there are more cars than people. In the U.S., there are nearly 800 cars per 1,000 people. With that comes increasing congestion, pollution, and resource consumption. Yet, surprisingly, the utilization of vehicles is at an all-time low—to put it simply, the more vehicles there are, the harder it is to keep them all in use. That’s a lot of waste.
Throughout government and private business, tens of millions of passenger cars are part of vehicle fleets used on-demand by employees. Making vehicles available when and where needed and keeping track of them is a surprisingly manual process today. Not surprisingly as a result, it’s fraught with high costs and low efficiency. In an effort to meet demand, managers of these fleets simply add vehicles to meet the highest peak demand. This results in more cars to own, manage, insure, store, and so on. But maddeningly, most of these cars end up either sitting idle, parked in the wrong place, or awaiting replacement of lost keys.
John Stanfield and Clement Gires had an idea for a better way to tackle the fleet problem. They shared a vision for reducing the number of cars on the road and increasing the amount any given car is used, while also making it easier than any other program existing to use a shared car.
John has a physics degree from Central Washington University and a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. He’s a conservationist at heart, having spent his years just after college as a forest firefighter. Along the way he invented an engine that processed vegetable oil into biodiesel. At Stanford, he began implementing an idea for a new type of vehicle—an electric car for urban areas that would be a resource shared among people, not owned by a single person. It would be a car that you jump in and use when needed, on demand.
About the same time, Clement Gires was studying behavioral economics at École Polytechnique when he wasn’t also working as part of a high-altitude Alpine rescue unit. Clement worked on the famed Vélib’ bicycle sharing program in Paris which encompasses over 18,000 bicycles in 1,200 locations providing well over 100,000 daily rides. Clement brought novel approaches to improve the distribution and utilization of bikes to the program before coming to the U.S. to study Management Science and Engineering at Stanford.
While climbing in Yosemite, John and Clement got to know each other. Initially, they spent time pursuing the electric vehicle John began, but soon realized that the real value of their work was in the underlying technology for sharing, which could be applied to any car.
Local Motion is bringing to market a unique combination of hardware, software, and services that redefine the way fleets of vehicles can be deployed, used, and managed. There are three unique aspects of the business, which come together in an incredible offering:
- Simple design. Open the app on your mobile device, locate a car or just go out to the designated spots and locate a car with a green light visible in the windshield—no reservations required. Walk up to the car, swipe your card key (same one you use for the office) or use your Bluetooth connected phone and the car unlocks and you’re in control. Forget to plug in your electric car and you’ll even get a text message. When you’re done, swipe your key to lock the car and let the system know the car is free.
- Powerful hardware. Underneath the dash is a small box that takes about 20 minutes to install. In the corner of the windshield is an indicator light that lets you know from a distance if the car is free or in use. The hardware works in all cars and offers a range of telemetry for the fleet manager beyond just location. In modern electric cars, the integration is just as easy but even deeper and more full-featured.
- Elegant software. Local Motion brings “consumerization of IT” to fleet management. For the fleet manager, the telematics are presented in a friendly user experience that integrates with your required backend infrastructure.
The folks at Local Motion share a vision for creating the largest network of shared vehicles. Today, customers are already using the product in business and government, but it’s easy to imagine a future where their technology could be used with any car.
Today, we are excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $6M Series A investment in Local Motion. I’m thrilled to join the board of Local Motion with John and Clement as part of my first board partner role with Andreessen Horowitz (see Joining a16z on this blog).
–Steven Sinofsky
This was also posted on http://blog.pmarca.com/
Learning by Shipping 