Eniko@BalaBit

Since October, 2009, the former Systems IT Security Hall in Munich moved and being organized in Nürnberg, Germany. The concept is the same, the only difference is that the whole trade show is shorter (3 days) and focused only on Security Vendors. The Expo is now called IT-SA The Security Expo.

We were exhibitors several years at the Systems Trade Show, but since 2008 we decided to visit other events. This year our distributor, TLK took us and represented also BalaBit at the IT-SA Expo between 19th and 21th October, 2010. We had Dietmar Wilde, Sales Manager and Martin Grauel, Pre-Sales Engineer at the booth, showing and explaining our most popular products: Shell Control Box and syslog-ng Store Box. Dietmar and Martin had several interesting meetings and we hope that the visibility of our products on the market will grow even more.

Like every year, BalaBit was again represented on the famous Open Source Monitoring Conference (formerly Nagios) in Nürnberg, Germany between the 6th and 7th October, 2010. In the previous years, our CEO and syslog-ng Chief Developer Balazs Scheidler held interesting presentations for those who were interested in the newest development of the logging field.

The selection for the participation is always done by Call for Papers processes and these we passed successfully with our interesting topic.

This time, our German Pre-Sales Engineer, Martin Grauel introduced the latest news on the patterndb project, which raised a lot interests among the audience. We also realized that only 2 people among 140 admitted that they have never had anything to do with syslog-ng, which I think is a very good ratio.

For further details on the conference, please visit the following website: http://www.netways.de/en/osmc/y2010/programm/

In case you are interested to read further on syslog-ng or the patterndb project, here you can find some useful links. Of course, questions or comments are always welcome. Get in touch with us!

syslog-ng OSE Website:

http://www.balabit.com/network-security/syslog-ng/opensource-logging-system

BalaBit Documentation

http://www.balabit.com/support/documentation

patterndb project

http://www.balabit.com/wiki/patterndb

patterndb cchema

http://git.balabit.hu/?p=bazsi/syslog-ng-patterndb.git;a=blob;f=SCHEMAS.txt;hb=HEAD

BalaBit syslog-ng mailing list

https://lists.balabit.hu/mailman/listinfo/syslog-ng

Balazs’s Blog

http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/

syslog-ng 3.2 git repo
git://git.balabit.hu/bazsi/syslog-ng-3.2.git

http://git.balabit.hu/?p=bazsi/syslog-ng-3.2.git;a=summary

syslog-ng sources und packages

http://www.balabit.com/downloads/files?path=/syslog-ng/open-source-edition

After we all enjoyed our little summer vacation, we all got back in track starting with a Press Event with our German distributor TLK on the 20th September in München.

Beside BalaBit, there were other big vendors presented, like Aerohive, Palo Alto and Arista Networks.

From our side, Marton Illes and Martin Grauel visited the event, while Marton was actually holding a presentation with the title “No one wants to be the guilty one – IT logging without any gap” – this is actually a rough translation of the German title, which I find very good:

KEINER WILL‘S GEWESEN SEIN – LÜCKENLOSES IT-LOGGING VON BALABIT IT SECURITY

Approximately 30 guests showed up and many of them were interested and raised some questions to Marton.

Thanks a lot to our PR Manager, who did an excellent job with the organisation!

I am very happy to announce that our first Italian Sales Manager has started to work officially at BalaBit this week.

Our new colleague’s name is Gaetano Gargiulo, having more than 10 years of sales experience. Gaetano is passionate about technology, sales and fast cars (like all Italians we think). He likes also swimming and sailing sports.

Professionally wise, Gaetano spent the last 2 years at Google, where he moved from Sales to Channel Management. Before Google he had the chance to work for big technology (SAP, APC) and financial (Assicurazioni Generali) companies, always in commercial roles, ranging from business development to key account management.

Gaetano has joined my team in the German subsidiary, strengthening our international presence in Italy.

Please welcome Gaetano!

This week TLK has announced in Germany our cooperation of distributing BalaBit products. The German IT distributor sees the potential in our solutions and wants to extend their reseller network and customer base by offering new products in their portfolio.

Let’s see some information on TLK :

The TLK Distribution GmbH belongs to the leading High-End-Solution oriented distributors in Germany and provides unique network and security solutions. The company was founded in 1983 and offers a wide range of products to Resellers and ISPs.

We are very proud of the agreement between our companies, because TLK puts a lot of effort in providing high level support and consulting to its partners. Just like if we would offer these services to the partners directly.

TLK provides technical trainings, professional pre- and post sales support, consulting, delivery, installation, implementation, etc. The company has at the moment around 50 employees and located in München, Münster and Berlin.

You can read the announcements in German on our website here .

Our company, BalaBit is celebrating its 10th Birthday this year! In Hungarian we say: “It is even too much from plum dumplings!” But of course in a company’s life it is just the beginning. We want to be in the history, we actually want to make history. We believe in our visionary and revolutionary products and we are confident that “this is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship”…

I am very happy that I got the chance to spend 50% of BalaBit’s life already with these guys and I am looking forward to add more to the history together with BalaBit.

We prepared some suprises for our colleagues and our customers, which we will announce on our website soon.

Tomorrow (18th June) we are celebrating all day together in a nice location in Budapest, so please forgive us if you do not receive an answer immediately, we will come back to you asap. Of course technical support is always an exception in such cases!

Thank you for your collaboration for making it happen!

I am sure I am not telling any secret, when I say that the most Log Agent for System i licenses we sell in Italy. I am also sure that the high usage of System i’s in Italy is not an individual case in Europe, just that until now only our Italian partners realized the potential of this product.

Since the small and medium-sized businesses take almost 90% of the Italian market, therefore for them it is a really interesting news that we introduced our Log Agent Lite for IBM System i.

The lite version differs from the full version in these ways:

1) Only log on and log off events are collected from the QHST system history file.
2) No messages are collected from the QSYSOPR message queue.
3) Only events are collected from the security journal QAUDJRN that are related to highly authorized users. A highly authorized user is one that has (or adopts) *ALLOBJ (all object) or *SECADM (security administrator) rights.

Some general information from our website on the Agent:

The syslog-ng server can be installed on any IBM System i into the Portable Application Solutions Environment (PASE). The syslog-ng Agent for IBM System i application is available for any version of IBM OS/400 or i5/OS from V5R3 and later.

For licensing and pricing information, please contact us!

This month has been very busy for our colleagues in Germany. Not only because they have been trying to serve all the interests for our products, but also because our partners also keep them busy.

Yesterday, on the 27th May, one of our most successful partners, Netfox AG held its 9th NETFOX Security Day in Berlin.

Netfox AG as a System Integrator has been offering first class IT services for more than 20 years. Their name guarantees a sophisticated IT Event for all the participants.

Around 9 representatives from top industrial companies around Berlin were curious what BalaBit has to say about IT forensics. From the products point of view, syslog-ng and Shell Control Box are both interesting topics. The presentation was held by Martin Grauel, Pre-Sales Engineer, who received many practical questions. The nice lunch afterwards also gave a nice opportunity for further informal discussions.

Thank you guys at Netfox for the nice organization!

It is so nice that I can post more and more about BalaBit Partner Events around the world. On the 13th May, our Pre-Sales Engineer, Csaba Major had the chance to present SCB and SSB to many resellers in Warsaw. The event was organized by our distributor, headtechnology. The company has subsidiaries in 11 countries and the guys have successfully sold BalaBit products already in almost all of their countries.

headtechnology proudly presents their HeadLight Event every year in all subsidaries. The Polish team had around 25 resellers on this half a day Event, which was organized in the very exclusive Le Méridian Bristol Hotel in Warsaw.

The Event was held in English and two other vendors presented their solutions”. To be one of the focus solution, makes us also proud, because headtechnology puts a lot of effort to make BalaBit well-known in Poland.

We often receive the question if technical product trainings are available from us as a vendor. The answer is: absolutely YES!

Our colleague, Peter Höltzl has been successfully holding trainings on BalaBit products in the last 6 years. He has not only pre-scheduled trainings in our Headquarter in Budapest regularly, but also technical trainings at customers’ sites, if it is requested. Some customers like to be trained personally by Peter in order to have a better understanding on the BalaBit products and in order to be more independent when an urgent case arises.

Peter has a very good sense to explain features and capabilities of our products. With his sense of humor, nice stories and expertise, Peter achieves that the attendees get a deep overview and a hands-on experience with BalaBit products.

Pre-schedule training dates can be found on our website here and by clicking on the product, a detailed agenda can be checked out.