Thursday, January 8, 2009

High Tower Topples?

High Tower Software, a SIM/SIEM vendor, hit the news (further coverage on Xconomy and Anton Chuvakin's Security Warrior site) in late November due to a shutdown. Various rumors came out of the company, and Brandon Dunlap's writeup on Brightfly tells a lot of the story. ArcSight jumped in immediately with Google ads, which Dunlap's article shows. LinkedIn showed a flurry of title changes from High Tower employees, as well as a number of recommendations, both of which are often seen when a company shuts down.

High Tower customers, however, were not so well informed, and continue to remain largely in the dark about their disposition of the company. The High Tower website hasn't seen an update since November, and the company's pending release of their newest software version is has not occurred.

High Tower met needs across the SIM/SEM spectrum, and competed with companies like TriGeo and with the industry heavyweights like ArcSight. Where does this leave customers? For the moment, they are left in limbo, albeit with functioning systems.

5 comments:

Brandon Dunlap said...

Don't forget that Trigeo heaped it on after ArcSight, offering essentailly a cross-grade license deal. You can see our additional coverage here (http://brightfly.com/content/view/611/2/).

BTW, thanks for the mention, and keep up the writing.

David said...

Thanks Brandon! It is interesting to see the other vendors jumping in so quickly and aggressively.

It looks like existing High Tower customers should be ok in the short term with functioning appliances, but their clock is ticking with no hardware or software support. It will be interesting to see who ends up acquiring the property rights.

JEE said...

The problem with High Tower was that they mistakenly brought in a ring of carpetbaggers to run the company a few years ago. Any serious background check would have discovered this. For example Cleve Adams and his group tried to take over eEye Digital a few years back, but in the due diligence process eEye wised up to Adams. High Tower was doomed the day he and his guys set foot in there.

hotep said...

Actually, customers are not ok in the short term, as there is an issue with the way the system deletes old data, which can apparently make the entire system crash. A friend of mine ran into this problem on their Cinxi appliance, and he said that tech support had to delete some files, it's not something the user can do.

hotep said...

Actually, customers may not be ok in the short term. Apparently there is an issue that can make the hard drive fill up rapidly and crash. A friend of mine said this happened on their Cinxi appliance, and they had to call tech support to fix this, it's not something the user can do.