Company status update

2010 has been an incredibly exciting year for Alienvault. The goals were set high and a lot of new stuff was supposed to happen, looking back at it now I first realize what we have achieved and how much work we've put into it.

On October 2009 both the Alienvault CEO and CTO joined a trip to Silicon Valley promoted by the "Comunidad de Madrid", where we visited some company incubators, Google offices and did some other stuff. But that trip was our eye opener, we needed to be competing in the US market with a stronger local presence, so Alienvault LLC got up and running.

The first public presence for this branch of Alienvault (originally founded on March 2007 btw) was at RSA 2010. It was fun but B-Sides, where I gave a Crappy talk :P, was much more interesting. But this is about the Company, so being there on the floor and sharing exhibit space with the other big players in the SIEM marketing was definetively a huge step forward.

Some OSSEC <--> AlienVault screenshots :-)

I recently tweeted about this, we're preparing a much tighter integration of OSSEC during this next release, starting with a web based management interface for:

• Rules
• Agent connection, crypto stuff
• Agentless
• OSSEC configuration
• Processes

Bundled with the reporting and analysis capabilities we've already got this makes for the perfect OSSEC companion.

Below are some teaser screenshots :-) (Devel guys will kill me, I should be completing the task definition instead of blogging about it...)

Screenshots:

May Poll results... a tad late

The outcome of the poll is clear: documentation is a must. We've been working on the installation and are pretty close to finish a very detailed user guide too. Updates to the wiki have happened and more interesting things in this direction will follow.

I for myself intend to continue with the tutorial series since I've heard good feedback on them.

I'm alive!

Finally I'll very soon get some more time (thanks to aliensanti :P) to write and am really excited about this  opportunity, really missed it.

My first three posts will be status updates:
- Company status update
- Product status update
- Personal status update

On all three areas there have been big and exciting changes which I'd like to share :-)

Best wishes to everybody!

May poll of the month: on OSSIM improvements.

I must say I really like this blogspot thing, nifty add-ons for the blog. I found a "polling one" and intend to run a poll each month and post the results and impressions on a summarized post.

This month's poll is about OSSIM improvements: where do you think the most improvement is required?
Thanks for any feedback on this, if you specify "Other" please comment on this post about what you meant.

How would you describe OSSIM?

We're currently giving http://www.alienvault.com a minor facelift.

What we want to feature there is nice things actual users can say about OSSIM. So if you're a happy OSSIM user and don't mind being quoted (anonymous references are welcome of course) on our frontpage, please comment on this post so that we can get your feedback.

The only think we'd require is a bit of context about yourself (we're using OSSIM in this 10000 user educational network, I've been managing OSSIM for a bank, etc...)

Every quote that makes it onto the page will be sent one of our upcoming Unofficial Official Alienvault t-shirts and a little stress-relieving alien, due to be released this summer ;-)

US Open Source Think Tank 2010 wrap-up

The main reason I switched over to blogger.com is because I wanted to talk about this truly amazing event I attended this weekend, the OpenSource Think Tank.

The private, invitation-only event was held at the Meritage Resort in Napa, California. A perfect venue for such an event IMHO. The event was organized by the Olliance Group and DLA Piper, sponsored by a number of open and not-so-open source companies, you can see a list on the main Think Tank Site. (Thanks a ton to the sponsors btw).

The three day event started with a 90 minute drive from Sunnyvale to Napa on a sunny Thursday morning (we followed this route) in the company of my Fiancee. There was no additional charge for bringing another person around so I thought putting her into the Spa was the best way of ensuring she wouldn't complain about myself working through the weekend :-)

New life, new blog platform

I decided to move from the old blogging platform to blogger.com.

I did setup pyblosxom for http://www.alienvault.com/blog/dk but I noticed that I was getting more and more tired of having to edit the html manually, copy it to the host, preview it, move it to the right place, etc, etc...

So here is this new iteration of the blog, I hope I'll have a chance to post much more often now with this. Focus will still be around OSSIM, Alienvault and personal rants, but as said, I expect to write more often now.

Thanks a ton to all that have read the stuff I posted in the past and are still hanging around :-)

For those new to the blog, the old one will be around for a long time at http://www.alienvault.com/blog/dk.

Dominique

PS: More info about the "new life" part as soon as I can talk about it ;-)