One of the biggest security challenges that face enterprises today is real-time visibility and threat detection. It’s a challenge that Tanium is aiming to solve, aided in part by a $90 million investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Though Tanium is making a big splash today, thanks to its funding news, the company was actually started in 2007.
“We operated without a sales or marketing staff for the first five years, and instead focused our time, energy and resources on building an incredible tool for enterprise systems management,” Orion Hindawi, co-founder and CTO of Tanium, wrote in an email to eWEEK. “That said, Tanium has amassed hundreds of customers in the last two years, all of which you can find on the Forbes 1000 or the Global 2000.”
As to why Tanium needed to raise funds at this point, Hindawi noted that the large enterprise market is not a forgiving one and has high expectations. Tanium has been working on product development and now it’s time for the company to scale for a broader enterprise customer base, he said.
Hindawi is no stranger to the world of security. Along with his father, David Hindawi, the two founded security firm BigFix back in 1997. BigFix, which was acquired by IBM in 2010, added endpoint system management capabilities for the IBM Tivoli product portfolio.
With Tanium, Hindawi is aiming to solve a problem that BigFix did not fix. He noted that some of the world’s largest companies used BigFix’s solution to manage their systems with great success. That said, Hindawi noted that the company kept running into new types of problems that current systems were not architected to solve using data that was days old.
“We knew there had to be a better way,” Hindawi said. “Tanium is our second act, the manifestation of our vision to modernize security and empower the biggest organizations in the world with real-time visibility and threat detection against professional-grade attacks.”
The promise of Tanium is the ability to rapidly identify a security threat on an enterprise network in as little as 15 seconds.
From a competitive standpoint, multiple vendors have been pushing the idea that a security information and event management (SIEM) platform is a core part of solving modern security challenges. For instance, IBM acquired Qradar through the 2010 acquisition of Q1 Labs, and HP bought the Arcsight SIEM platform in 2010.
Hindawi noted that Tanium is a systems and security management company that has created a completely new approach. He noted that the Tanium approach provides real-time visibility and can scale up to 500,000 devices.
With the new funding in hand, Hindawi now aims to grow the customer base and continue to scale and refine the Tanium product offering.
“Five years from now, we would like to see every Global 2000 company using this platform,” Hindawi said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.