Mr. Sharma: Solidcore makes change control software, which helps enterprise organizations reduce their business risks by gaining visibility and control over changes happening on critical servers, workstations, databases and network devices. Solidcore also makes change control software for embedded systems, which is used by major device manufacturers such as NCR, NEC and WYSE to securely leverage open systems and lockdown their ATM machines, point-of-sale devices and thin-client computers. Solidcore is a private, venture-backed company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Solidcore was founded in 2003 as a security software company with a vision for preventing the "unknown," zero-day threats. By working closely with our customers, we evolved our business to address the growing problem of change. Change is a fact of life in any evolving business, but IT organizations today are constantly firefighting to ensure their IT services stay available in light of constant changes. Today, unauthorized and out-of-policy changes account for nearly 80% of all IT service outages. Solidcore is backed by leading investors Matrix Partners, Menlo Ventures and Sevin Rosen Funds. We have more than 70 customers from around the globe who are using Solidcore to successfully add automated change control to their critical IT systems. This includes some of the biggest names in manufacturing, healthcare and retail with customers that include General Motors, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Los Angeles World Airports, Restoration Hardware, and WebEx.
TWST: Could you comment on this solution's depth and share with us a few
examples highlighting the key features?
Mr. Sharma: Solidcore's S3 Control software is extremely powerful for linking
actual change activity on the infrastructure with an organization's existing
change process. There are three key components to what Solidcore provides.
First, our software is the industry's first and only solution to automate the
enforcement of change management policies. This is significant because if a
change is not made at the appropriate time, or made from an appropriate source,
or is not tied to an approved process, Solidcore will prevent the change from
happening. Our software can also notify an administrator who attempted to make
the inappropriate change.
Second, Solidcore provides real-time visibility of change activity. This
tracking in real-time replaces older scan-based technology by providing insight
into what changes are being made, when changes are made, and by whom. This
enables IT staff to pinpoint changes made on network devices, databases, servers
or desktops at a moments notice, and can quickly resolve incidents and outages
caused by a change. Solidcore is like looking at a movie of change activity to
figure out what is happening, while other legacy technology is like looking at
two snapshots.
Third, Solidcore provides accountability by automatically correlating changes in
the infrastructure with an existing change-ticketing system. This enables IT
organizations to validate that only approved changes are made. The product also
automatically populates change tickets with change details to greatly reduce the
manual effort required to document compliance.
As an example, we are deployed on more than 2,000 servers at WebEx, the leader
in Web conferencing solutions. WebEx's business challenge was to ensure
continuous service availability across their hosted collaboration platform.
WebEx identified system change as the leading cause of downtime, and deployed
Solidcore to automate the enforcement of a change time-window, where changes to
their critical servers could only be made at authorized times.
Another example is Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), which is the airport
authority for LAX, Ontario, Van Nuys and Palmdale Regional Airports. In 2006,
LAWA undertook a project to identify critical points in their infrastructure
where change could pose a significant business risk. They identified several
areas where change could impact critical systems, including badging servers for
access, firewalls, and communication servers. They deployed Solidcore to
proactively lockdown these critical servers and prevent unauthorized changes
from compromising airport operations.
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