SenSage is leveraging its history in security information management with its event data warehouse. By focusing on event data, SenSage is looking to cut its own path distinct from vendors such as Oracle, Teradata and Netezza in the data warehouse space.
In the crowded space that is data
warehousing, SenSage is trying to carve out its own niche by leveraging its
history in security information management for what it calls the event data
warehouse.
To hear SenSage tell it, the event data warehouse aims to help enterprises
deal with voluminous amounts of event data such as records created
by business transactions and communications.
"Long-term retention of these types of records is often required to
detect fraud [and] analyze performance trends, and, in the case of
communication records, the retention is mandated by government regulations for
access by law enforcement agencies," said SenSage CEO
Jim Pflaging.
In its recently released SenSage 4.0, the company leverages its columnar
database architecture. Its ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tool
pulls data into the warehouse, where it is compressed and spread across server
nodes to allow for high insertion rates. Data queries are distributed across
data warehouse nodes as well to improve performance.
"As a columnar database, the SenSage EDW [event data warehouse] does
not require indices but provides an advanced querying technique, known as Bloom
Filters, to determine if the data required to satisfy a query exists in trees on
the nodes," Pflaging said. "[Our product] does not require users to
have any understanding of SQL to build powerful queries by providing a query
wizard. Queries can be saved and run on any schedule. Result sets can be viewed
as a list of records or in a number of graphical reports with summaries that
allow users to drill down to details."
SenSage's next move is to expand system scalability by taking advantage of
new performance features such as multicore processors and advances to the Linux
operating system. Also, the company wants to expand integration with tools that
provide advanced analytics, Pflaging said.
The data
warehousing space has many contenders, including Oracle, Teradata and
Netezza, three of SenSage's chief competitors. But some analysts have said
SenSage's focus on purpose-built event data warehouses gives it a slightly
different market position than other vendors. Forrester Research analyst
James Kobielus predicted that the need for event data warehouses will likely
grow as organizations seek to consolidate, analyze, query, report on and
archive event information for security and compliance purposes.
"SenSage doesn't attempt to compete head-on with Teradata, Oracle, IBM
and others for the core EDW market opportunities-i.e., customer data
integration, financial data consolidation, etc.-instead, they predominantly
target EDW opportunities in support of fraud detection, [Sarbanes-Oxley Act]
auditing, forensic investigations, privileged-user monitoring, root-cause
analysis, call-detail record analysis and law enforcement," Kobielus said.
Philip Howard, an analyst with Bloor Research, said there is a market for
event data warehouses, but it is nascent and characterized by different approaches.
"For example, CopperEye, which has built an
appliance with Sun, is focused just on CDRs [call data records] ... while
LogLogic only records log data and not CDRs," Howard said. "SenSage
does both."
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