Acquisition Supports Aggressive Go-to-Market Expansion to Surpass its 200+ Customers by Combining Real-Time Behavioral Threat Detection with In-Memory Endpoint Threat Analysis

WALTHAM, Mass. (July 15, 2015) – CounterTack, the leader in Big Data Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), today announced it has acquired ManTech Cyber Solutions International (MCSI), a commercial software division of ManTech International Corporation (Nasdaq:MANT). The acquisition enhances CounterTack’s leadership position in the EDR market, and will enable CounterTack to deliver truly unprecedented value to its market-leading 200+ customers, by combining real-time operating system-level behavioral threat detection with in-memory threat analysis that maps to the entire cyber kill chain and scales enterprise-wide. ManTech will become an equity investor in CounterTack as well as a global distribution partner.

This acquisition comes on the heels of CounterTack’s recent $15 million Series C round of funding, led by TenEleven Ventures with other new investors, including EDBI (the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), along with the participation of existing investors.

“We’re thrilled to have MCSI and its innovative products as part of CounterTack to deliver cutting edge EDR technology, and expand our dramatically larger EDR customer footprint against CrowdStrike and others,” said Neal Creighton, President and CEO, CounterTack. “The powerful combination of real-time operating system surveillance with in-memory threat analysis capabilities positions CounterTack as a clear market leader, and we look forward to driving more value for our customers with new products and services.”

CounterTack will support three products in the endpoint detection and response category:

• Sentinel – CounterTack’s flagship Big Data Endpoint Detection & Response platform for the enterprise.
• Active Defense – Enterprise-class malware detection and analysis platform, powered by Digital DNA.
• Responder Pro – Advanced in-memory forensics, malware analysis and reverse engineering tool specifically designed for incident responders, powered by Digital DNA.

Digital DNA is the only in-memory malware behavioral detection and analysis engine featuring well over 2,200 traits and its ultra-advanced Malware Genome library.

“We believe this strategic relationship will enable CounterTack to assume the leadership position in the next-generation endpoint security market,” stated L. William Varner, President, ManTech Mission, Cyber and Intelligence Solutions Group. “CounterTack has demonstrated consistent growth for the past three years and has prioritized the success of its customers amid the rapidly changing endpoint threat environment. We look forward to helping fuel their growth in the EDR market and to providing any support necessary.”

“The ability to detect and respond to endpoint threats from multiple angles across the operating system and physical memory makes this transaction highly valuable for customers on both sides of the acquisition,” says Adrian Sanabria, Senior Security Analyst, 451 Research. “This market will be dictated largely by the ability to support organizations in detecting and rapidly responding to threats that have made it past traditional perimeter defenses and onto the endpoint. It is important in this market to cover the whole incident response lifecycle and the entire endpoint attack surface. CounterTack has accelerated its ability to deliver in-memory scans at-scale, behavioral-based detection and accelerated system triage to customers through this transaction.”

As part of the transaction, Mr. Varner will join CounterTack’s Board of Directors as a Board Observer.

CounterTack will debut its suite of EDR solutions at upcoming industry conferences worldwide, including RSA Asia 2015 and Black Hat USA 2015.

• RSA Asia 2015: July 22 – 24, Booth S14, Level 5, Grand Ballroom, Marina Bay Sands Resort, Singapore.
• Black Hat USA 2015: August 5 & 6, Booths 1147 and 447, Mandalay Bay Casino & Resort, Las Vegas, NV.

About CounterTack

CounterTack is the leading provider of real-time, Big Data endpoint detection and response technology for the enterprise. CounterTack provides unprecedented visibility and context around endpoint behavior to targeted, persistent threats to improve incident response and threat detection, enterprise-wide.

Built on Big Data architecture to counter endpoint threats at-scale and leveraging tamper-resistant collection for pure behavioral capture on enterprise endpoints, (laptops, servers, workstations, mobile devices) CounterTack dramatically reduces the impact of advanced attacks in real-time, giving teams an opportunity to defend the enterprise before incidents escalate.

Celtra has been featured in Financial Times.

 

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WALTHAM, Mass. (June 2, 2015) – CounterTack, the leader in Big Data Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), today announced it has closed a $15 million Series C round of funding, led by TenEleven Ventures, with other new investors in the round including EDBI (the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), along with the participation of existing investors.

The funding will help CounterTack support its accelerated go-to-market strategy, further its global expansion initiatives and deliver truly scalable next-generation endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology to its growing portfolio of enterprise customers. CounterTack is the one EDR provider truly delivering unprecedented endpoint detection, forensic analysis, threat visualization and real-time response capabilities to the enterprise and the SMB market through strategic MSSP partnerships.

“With cybersecurity innovation at an all-time high, CounterTack is leading by integrating high-powered Big Data technology with security telemetry to produce actionable data to help respond to the enterprise-level threats where SQL-based solutions simply can’t scale,” said Alex Doll, Founder, and Managing General Partner, TenEleven Ventures. “CounterTack provides a new level of visibility, context and control to enterprise teams who need to protect their most valuable data, along with powerful threat correlation and automated response capabilities, to counter sophisticated, unknown endpoint threats at-scale, across the enterprise. We’re thrilled to participate in this fundraise to foster continued growth to meet EDR market demand.”

“Traditional threat detection and prevention approaches are ineffective to the attacks we see against endpoints and users today and even perimeter defenses labeled as ‘advanced’ can be evaded by attackers,” says Adrian Sanabria, Senior Security Analyst, 451 Research. “Today’s enterprises must be able to detect and rapidly respond to threats that have made it past these defenses, onto the endpoint. This approach must be able to cut through the typical security alert ‘static’ to give analysts accurate intelligence about threats across the entire enterprise, in real time.”

“The rapid digitization of economies poses cybersecurity challenges to businesses globally,” said Chu Swee Yeok, CEO and President, EDBI. “The presence of leading cybersecurity companies such as CounterTack in Singapore, with its unique endpoint threat detection and response solutions, will help strengthen business resilience against rising cyber attacks. We look forward to realizing CounterTack’s Asian growth plans through our extensive network in the region.”

Key Growth Milestones:

CounterTack reported 300% YoY Q1 growth from 2014 to 2015 at the RSA Conference North America in April 2015.
The company was named to the JMP Securities Fast 50 list of hottest privately held security and networking companies.
CounterTack is a 2014 Gartner Cool Vendor, recognized for innovation in the Endpoint Security market. (May 2014) CounterTack’s CEO Neal Creighton will participate in the ‘Top Market Trends in the Endpoint Detection and Response Market’ panel at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, June 8, 2015 from 10:00 am – 10:45 am EST at the Gaylord Resort, National Harbor, MD.
TenEleven Ventures and EDBI join CounterTack’s current investors including Goldman Sachs, Fairhaven Capital, Siemens Venture Partners, Razor’s Edge, OnPoint Technologies (investment fund of U.S. Army) and Alcatel-Lucent.

Drizly, the Boston-based maker of an alcohol delivery mobile app, has tapped a former spokeswoman from one of Boston’s largest tech companies.

Kerin Horgan, former media relations manager at Boston-based online home furnishings giant Wayfair (NYSE: W), joined the startup this week as senior manager of communications.

Horgan is the first of several new hires that will be joining the company over the next few months. By the end of the year, co-founder and CEO Nicholas Rellas said the company’s total headcount will grow from about 40 to 70.

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Investors in Boston-based Drizly, the maker of an alcohol-delivery mobile app, now include the Washington, D.C.-based Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The news came a day after the Boston Business Journal reported that Drizly was on the verge of closing a new round of investor funding and planning to expand from 15 markets to 30 the end of the year.

The WSWA is a 72-year-old trade association representing more than 350 liquor distributors, according to the Journal.

Total funding to date for the company is about $5 million and its investors include Cambridge-based Suffolk Equity Partners, Fairhaven Capital and Chicago-based private equity firm Continental Investors.

Drizly did not disclose the WSWA’s funding amount, though co-founder and CEO Nicholas Rellas said in a statement that “This is a fantastic opportunity for Drizly and the WSWA to further compliant alcohol delivery, while also being a great stamp of approval from the WSWA on the business and team we’ve built here at Drizly and the vision we have for the future.”

About half of Drizly’s 40 employees are currently based at Drizly’s headquarters at 334 Boylston St., which encompasses about 3,500 square feet. The company is looking to move to a new Boston-area headquarters triple that size in the coming months.

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Silverlight support might be ending, but enterprises that rely on it for multicast now have an option that uses existing video systems.

With Silverlight support coming to an end from Microsoft, enterprises that rely on it for multicast video to reach large, geographically diverse corporate networks are looking for an easy solution. Content optimization platform Ramp says it has the answer with Ramp Multicast Engine (RME), a new product announced today. RME is a true multicast cross-platform solution, Ramp claims, one that lets enterprises avoid proprietary and expensive options.

RME delivers standards-based multicast and works with any live video workflow that uses HLS (HTTP Live Streaming). It lets enterprises update and use their existing multicast live video systems without turning to costly and proprietary enterprise content delivery networks (eCDNs), media servers, or custom video players—a potential savings of millions of dollars, Ramp says.

“Our patent-pending technology enables the use of established standards (HLS); secure transit (encrypted HLS segments); and access via common browsers, video players, and operating systems (Chrome, IE, Safari, Windows, iOS, and Android) without the need for proprietary hardware or software installations,” says Ramp CEO Tom Wilde.

Besides solving the Silverlight problem, RME also brings multicast to Chrome, useful as Chrome recently ended plug-in support and lacks native multicast support. RME can be use on-premises or within Ramp’s live SaaS-based streaming solution.

Anyone at this week’s Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago, Illinois, can see RME firsthand in booth 506.

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Purchase the report here: http://insight.venturebeat.com/report/social-media-management-tools-tactics-and-how-win?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=sf

Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) that it has acquired the assets of HarvestMark, a provider of food traceability and quality inspection solutions, from YottaMark, Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. HarvestMark is a market leader in delivering insights throughout the fresh food supply chain from farm to fork. Its platform and tools make food data collection efficient, complex information simple to view and prioritize, and provides actionable insights to drive sales and profit. HarvestMark enables food producers, distributors and retailers to meet food safety requirements, build shopper loyalty, secure their supply chain and optimize product freshness and quality. The acquisition of HarvestMark further enhances Trimble’s position in Agriculture and Transportation and Logistics within the food supply chain.

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Content is the new digital currency. We see it in the ways publishers are reshaping their products, and in the way social networks deliver value to users. BuzzFeed, the company that taught everyone about native advertising’s true potential, is putting content—as opposed to links—directly in its social feeds, with impressive results. Similarly, Snapchat’s recently launched Discover tool goes beyond video chats and instant messaging to provide its users with publisher “stories” from across the Web.

Marketers are also looking for new ways to leverage content, and not just through native ads and branded storytelling. Increasingly they’re using new data-driven tools such as programmatic advertising. To date, advertisers have used programmatic ad buying strategies to maximize media efficiency and ROI. But that is quickly changing. In its 2015 Digital & Media Predictions report, research agency Millward Brown forecasts a new kind of programmatic marketing in which brand stories and data enjoy equal weight.

The rise of programmatic creative
Programmatic creative is based on the concept that ad messaging should be built around audience data, incorporating signals specific to a user’s environment. This allows brands to tell stories that speak to each individual consumer. Core signals like location, weather and time of day are used to modify creative messaging and visual elements in real-time. A single ad execution becomes a creative chameleon that adjusts its appearance as needed.

This kind of approach expands a brand’s opportunities for creative expression. Companies recognize the value of branded content, but often struggle to measure their content marketing efforts. They know there’s value in telling a story, but marketers are often driven by demands of achieving campaign goals at scale. Data-driven dynamic ads afford the ability to tell an engaging brand story that’s both highly personalized and precision-targeted. It’s a strategy that monetizes on the powerful connection between data and content, minimizes trafficking overhead and maximizes relevance.

Omnichannel ads: storytelling over time
The ability to deliver ads on multiple screens is increasingly critical to marketing success. Research firm eMarketer reports the number of mobile shoppers grew by 23 million between 2013 and 2014. Consumers continue to tap every available retail channel, looking to create the shopping experience that fits their needs. Activities like in-store mobile research and showrooming give advertisers the opportunity to capture shoppers’ attention when it counts.

Some advertisers are starting to experiment with ad sequencing in this regard. First, a general brand message, designed to intrigue and convey some key brand characteristics, is delivered. The consumer then receives an ad introducing product information. This is followed by a final execution that includes a call to action. These ads can take the form of online videos, data-driven HTML5 mobile banners or even Facebook posts placed through Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just like a novel or play, these “acts” work together to create a cohesive story that’s suited to the omnichannel consumer.

Forging powerful partnerships
This approach helps brands forge an emotional connection with their customers. In prioritizing targeting over other strategies, many marketers overlook the critical place of emotive messaging in building brand affinity. By delivering an emotive message to the right person at the right time, programmatic creative can fulfill even the uppermost brand advertising goals.

It’s therefore critical that marketers prioritize partnerships—that is to say, creative strategists working with media buyers, and content developers working with data analysts. Millward Brown predicts that advertisers will eventually supplement programmatic campaign parameters with “richer audience psychographic and attitudinal data,” including brand favorability.

All around us the media is embracing and elevating content, and marketers are doing the same. But that doesn’t mean they’re required to sacrifice campaign effectiveness. Crafting dynamic creative, creating true omnichannel experiences and forging powerful partnerships can help your brand tell a story that goes beyond both content marketing and automated media buying to create an entirely new methods of delivering meaningful ads.

 

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Your future robotic roommate was not ready to make the trip to SXSW.

“Jibo is going through the commercialization process right now,” said Cynthia Breazeal, the MIT professor and social robotics pioneer who is the driving force behind the 11-inch-tall robot, which could pass for a distant relative to WALL-E.

Breazeal, a keynoter here, is dead serious about Jibo’s future as a humanized robotic member of the household, an engaging companion to teach first grade math to your kid, to remind grandma to take her medicine and to make sure you get the groceries you need.

But Jibo is not meant to be a “slave-robot” either — it is not going to go to Safeway for you, much less vacuum the floor. What makes it different from, say, a Roomba or an entertainment-oriented toy robot is, in Breazeal’s words, “this notion of platform, taking something from the playbook of the Android and iOS app ecosystems.”

Along those lines, she is courting developers to produce apps or “skills,” as she calls them, for Jibo. There’ll be a Jibo store.

Jibo garnered attention over the summer when the startup Breazeal founded raised about $2.3 million in an Indiegogo campaign, well above her initial goal of $100,000. The discounted crowdfunding price for anyone who pre-ordered Jibo was $499; consumers will pay about $100 more when Jibo becomes available to the general public, likely in the middle of next year.

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