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Posted by Brandon Dunlap
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Monday, 21 July 2008 |
Rohati Systems has secured $12 million to fuel market expansion along with enhanicng their Network-Based Entitlement Control (NBEC) solutions. This second round of funding from Foundation Capital and Matrix Partners follows the Series A money both firms invested back in March of 2007, bringing the total to a staggering $22.6 million, and their product hasn't even been released yet! So much for the "new way" of doing things on a shoestring and being in perpetual beta. To their credit, they have been taking the product on tour, showing it off at the Gartner IT Security summit back in May, and again at the Burton Catalyst Conference in June. According to the press release, both firms are ecstatic about their investments. "We are very pleased with the progress Rohati has made since our initial investment in 2005. The significant increase in valuation in this round is a testament to the rapid progress that the team has made," said Shirish Sathaye, general partner at Matrix Partners.
"Rohati continues to be an excellent investment opportunity for numerous reasons. The company has the right combination of management talent, market expertise and proven ability to execute," said Adam Grosser, general partner at Foundation Capital.
This is a clasic case of betting on a solid team with a new twist on a stumbling technology. In this instance, it's a bunch of Cisco guys trying to wake everyone up from the nightmare entitlements has become. Rohati's model for solving the access control problem is to build an appliance that sits close enough to the data assets that it can learn transaction level activity and build views of who touches what. Then, the product can build rulesets (aka: policies) which can be modified by the administrators to further dial them in. We see this as having a good play within organiztions that are struggling with entitlement reporting for compliance reasons. In this case, just learning the behaviors of the users and logging that activity for future reference can be a huge help in making entitlement decisions. Too often we have noticed that the managers charged with authorizing usres and approving audit reports of user access on aquarterly basis are doing so largely on a guess. Our hope is that this new approach gives them a better view into the user activity and allows for more granualr decision making but without the overhead. Of course, the only way to find out is to get the product to market. Recommend this article...  Comment |  Add as favorites (0) |  Link to this | Views: 228 | Read more...
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 July 2008 )
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Posted by Brandon Dunlap
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Thursday, 17 July 2008 |
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As Shimel picked up earlier this week, CRN/ChannelWeb dropped what they undoubtably thought was a quite a bomb [article here]. According to the article (and eWeek's sensationalist version here) Symantec was going to strip their own channel of the top 900 global accounts, taking them all direct. According to some, this sort of strategy is what helped bring ISS down. Not quite believing what we were reading (it just seemed a bit, well...crazy and irrational), we dug deeper. After a few calls, into Symantec, their channel partners, and the financial community, we learned that this was not a new strategy at all. It seems that Big yellow has always allowed their bigger customers to go direct, even if a channel partner registered the deal and brought it to the table. While this seems to "poison the channel", as Shimel said, I have been assured that in most (but not all cases) if the partner registers the deal, but the customer goes direct, then the VAR still gets a 'kickback' on the deal from Symantec. Now, I don't know if this common amongst other vendors, but this does show another leverage point for the buyer. If you can save a few points on the deal by going direct with Symantec, but a VAR did the legwork, then you know a bit of the deal will flow back to them. This is a clear indicator that a little more can be squeezed out of the deal to your advantage. It also means that an interesting dynamic can be created by pitting Symantec against their own channel for the business. In short, the VARs need to work very hard to put the Value back in their name. Symantec's COO, Enrique Salem's response to the firestorm, forwarded to us by our concerned colleagues, is pasted below the fold. Also, the PDF of Salem's original comments to Wall Street , quoted int eh above mentioned articles, can be found here. Page 25 seems to be where all of this noise started. Recommend this article... Comment | Add as favorites (0) | Link to this | Views: 311 | Read more... |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 July 2008 )
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Posted by Mark Adams
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Friday, 11 July 2008 |
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I saw this story and just had to write about it because it helps prove the case I had been making several months ago, namely that the audit firms see the next big thing as IFRS and XBRL. The previous link discusses how KPMG sees big money in the migration from India GAAP to IFRS, and I'm sure they're not the only ones. Here's the money quote: "If companies’ accounts have to be IFRS-compliant by 2011, their accounts for the preceding year will also have to be IFRS-compliant so as to make comparison of results meaningful." Cha-ching! Furthermore, this comment on re: The Auditors reinforces the statements I have been making that XBRL is also viewed as a potential cash cow: "In fact, they [the audit firms] are thanking the SEC and Chairman Cox for handing them the next big things, windfalls for additional work and fees that requirements such as IFRS and XBRL will bring to the firms now that Sarbanes-Oxley fees are stabilizing."
Sarbanes-Oxley was referred to as the "Big 4 Welfare Act" when it came out in 2002. It seems that now the firms have something new to cheer about. The other gem I found in this blog was this: "Uncertainty breeds more fees for the firms, since they are the final arbiters of the success of implementing any of these initiatives."
How true! The gravy train keeps rolling. Recommend this article... Comment | Add as favorites (0) | Link to this | Views: 226 | Read more... |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 14 July 2008 )
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