Tom Kemp's Centrify Blog

As we head into the holiday season and the New Year, I first would like to wish all our customers, partners and employees a Happy Holiday season. We certainly appreciate your support. I also want to use this blog post to reflect on calendar year 2011 as it relates to Centrify. This past year has probably been the most significant calendar year for Centrify since 2004 (which was the year we formed the company). In this blog post I want to highlight some of our major milestones and also give some thoughts on what's in store for Centrify in 2012.

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The last of three 2012 predictions from me has been published. The latest is on my predictions in the virtualization market that Virtual-Strategy.com was kind enough to publish.

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I was asked to give some 2012 predictions regarding mobility and ESJ.com was kind enough to publish them.

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Today we shipped Centrify Express 2012 — our comprehensive suite of free Active Directory-based integration solutions for authentication, single sign-on, remote access, file-sharing, monitoring and cloud security for cross-platform systems. It is another milestone release in terms of added functionality (more on that below) and new platforms supported (with nearly 50 new OSes added!). It is also marks the milestone that well over 100,000 IT Pros have acquired Centrify Express in the last 12 months alone.

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A few weeks ago we announced that both Centrify Suite and Centrify Express now support Canonical's recently released Ubuntu 11.10 ("Oneiric Ocelot"). What is of significance — and what was also the case with Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) — is that Canonical is distributing Centrify Express with Ubuntu 11.10 through its Ubuntu Software Partner Repository. Which means that IT professionals can now quickly and easily integrate Ubuntu 11.10 servers and desktops into Microsoft Active Directory for centralized authentication and single sign-on - and do so free.

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A few blogs and publications have asked me, among other folks in the industry, to contribute to their respective annual end-of-year prediction series. So I have been busy the last few days peering into my "crystal ball" and writing up a few articles.

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Today we announced that Tim Steinkopf has joined us as our Chief Financial Officer. Tim has a number of years of being a CFO at both public and private companies and will definitely help us manage our continued high growth and momentum. Some of you may recall Tim as the former CFO of publicly traded security company Secure Computing Corporation that was acquired by McAfee a few years ago. We are very pleased to have someone with Tim's skills and personality on board the Centrify team.

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Besides the recent release of Centrify Suite 2012 — which is probably our most significant release since our Version 1.0 release of DirectControl — Centrify has been also busy on a number of fronts over the last few weeks. Notable items include receiving a patent for our Zoning technology, receiving FIPS 140-2 Level 1 Certification, the Centrify Suite winning a SC Magazine 5 Star award, and our European expansion. Coupled these with our major product release and our recent major round of funding, collectively these items show our continued momentum in the market. In this blog I will briefly elaborate on some of the newer announcements.

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I have been doing a series of blog posts on Centrify Suite 2012, and in this blog post I want to focus on the improvements we made in manageability of our software as well as some other key features in the area of simplified replacement of legacy NIS environments and extended platform coverage.

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We recently shipped Centrify Suite 2012, one of the most significant major releases we have ever done as a company, and in today's blog I want to focus on the improvements we have made to our patented Zoning capability and also discuss a new featured called Computer Roles.

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Over the last week or so Centrify has announced a major product upgrade in the form of Centrify Suite 2012, the award of a US patent for our Zones technology, the US Government has awarded us FIPS certification and that a major security publication gave our products a perfect 5 out of 5 stars. Suffice to say I have a lot of catching up to do blogging-wise to give my take on these great announcements! Over the next few blog posts I will give you my take on the significance of Centrify Suite 2012, and let me kick off with Part 1 of this series of blog posts by discussing the release of Centrify DirectAudit 2.0.

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As discussed in my last blog post, second generation AD Bridging products have been on the market for a number of years now, with Centrify taking a clear leadership role based on install base, breadth and depth of product portfolio, revenue, sales growth, etc. In this blog post I will give some of my thoughts on the future of Active Directory and Active Directory bridging.

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In case you missed it, in May of this year the industry celebrated the 14th birthday of "bridging" Active Directory to non-Microsoft systems. Fourteenth (??!!) birthday you say — how can that be when Active Directory was not even released until 2000? In this blog post I will explain that, walk you through the history of bridging Active Directory and give my thoughts on where the next generation of Active Directory bridging should go.

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Besides blogging here at Centrify.com, I am also blogging away at my "Secure Thinking" blog site over at Forbes.com. In this blog post I wanted to expand on my latest Forbes.com blog post entitled "Security's Inside Jobs" which I believe is highly relevant to one of the key value propositions - superuser privilege management - that Centrify provides.

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We have gotten a lot of positive reaction to our recent announced that we have raised $16 million in Series D financing to fuel growth and our extensions into the cloud. You can read news articles of the funding at VentureBeat, TheVARGuy.com, SecurityWeek, and The San Jose Business Journal among the many publications that covered this news.

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The Centrify team is very excited to announce that Centrify has raised $16 million in Series D funding. We see this as another positive endorsement of our products and strategy, the team we have assembled, the great set of customers and partners we have been able to bring on board, our track record of success including high annual growth and profitability, and the overall market opportunity we have here with Centrify.

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In honor of Splunk's annual user conference happening this week, I wanted to blog about Centrify Insight. Implemented as a Splunk app, Centrify Insight is a free monitoring and reporting tool that helps you identify and analyze authentication, authorization and other events taking place on the UNIX, Linux and Mac systems managed by Centrify Suite or Centrify Suite Express. This information strengthens organizations' compliance efforts and improves security in on-premise and cloud environments. In this blog post I will discuss what Centrify Insight is, why we built, where we plan to take it, and how it differs from other approaches.

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Today we announced results from our fiscal yearthat recently ended June 30th. We did not think we could top the great 50 percent year-to-year growth that we experienced last fiscal year, but this year we beat that and grew approximately 75 percent year-to-year. In addition, we achieved record profitability and were cash-flow positive as well.

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I am pleased to announce DirectControl for Mac OS 10.7, which provides support for the newly released OS 10.7 Lion system update from Apple.

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I am pleased to announce that Forbes.com has now taken me on as a guest blogger. I will still blog on Centrify-specific topics over here at Centrify.com, but my views on security, infrastructure software, entrepreneurship, life in Silicon Valley and general what-have-you will appear over at my Forbes.com blog called "Secure Thinking."

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In this blog post I am going to talk about what we are doing with respect to our support for securing Linux systems deployed on Amazon EC2.

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As part of our CloudTools release we are delivering some Centrify-specific RightScripts. As a reminder, Centrify CloudTools is an integrated collection of free tools and enhancements to existing products that lets organizations dynamically apply Active Directory-based authentication and access control to Linux systems running within cloud hosting providers such as Amazon EC2 and the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. In this blog post I will describe what "RightScripts" are and discuss what our RightScripts do.

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OK, so we are all hearing about "The Cloud." Cloud this, Cloud that. Vendors talk about it all the time, but are they simply blogging about it and telling their investors about this hot new thing called "The Cloud" or are they also actually delivering products that are specific and optimized and useful to "The Cloud"? Well, Centrify heard all this talk of the "The Cloud," we talked to Cloud providers, and of course talked to our customers, and decided to actually do something about "The Cloud." So after a good deal of research figuring out what customers care about vis a vis securing "The Cloud," and after a good bit of development effort, the other day we released, for free, Centrify CloudTools.

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Today we released a major upgrade to Centrify Express — Centrify Express 2011 — that adds two new solutions to our Express offering (Centrify Cloud Tools and Centrify Insight — bringing the total number of solutions that comprise Express to five), major feature enhancements to the three pre-existing Express solutions, and also the unique addition of the expansion of our free Active Directory bridging support beyond on-premise systems to cloud-based systems as well. In this blog post I will discuss some of these new capabilities we added in Centrify Express 2011.

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As was the case with prior quarters, I am pleased to announce that we recently concluded yet another record-breaking quarter.

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Centrify CEO Tom Kemp will be the guest on 'The CEO Show' on Tuesday, April 26th at 7 p.m. PST on San Jose radio station KLIV 1590 AM.

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In this blog post I will describe Centrify Suite 2011's improved deployability and manageability via enhanced DNS handling as well as enhancements we added to DirectAudit, DirectSecure and Centrify-enabled OpenSSH.

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In this blog post I will describe Suite 2011's enhanced administration and privilege management capabilities for UNIX/Linux/Mac systems as well as its expanded platform coverage and additional application single sign-on capabilities.

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Today we announced Centrify Suite 2011, the latest release of our flagship security and compliance solution. Centrify Suite 2011 boasts enhanced administration and privilege management capabilities for UNIX/Linux/Mac systems, expanded platform coverage and additional application single sign-on capabilities allowing enterprises finer grain control and auditing over an expanded set of data center systems and enterprise applications. In today's blog post I am going to highlight some of the neat Linux and Mac desktop management capabilities we added in this release.

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In a prior blog post I discussed how I thought sudo and sync'ing sudo files is an inadequate solution for UNIX/Linux authorization. Writing that blog post got me thinking on how authentication and authorization really go hand-in-hand, especially for securing underlying operating systems such as UNIX and Linux, and should be delivered to customers as an integrated solution. In this blog post I will describe why that's the case, and discuss why most of the existing vendors out there are also saying the two also go hand-in-hand, but are delivering the opposite or not even delivering one of the two key components. Hopefully at the end of this blog post you will agree that it is inefficient to have a separate solution (and architecture) for UNIX authentication and for UNIX authorization.

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As was the case with prior quarters, I am pleased to announce that we recently concluded yet another record-breaking quarter for us.

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In the past I have highlighted many of the positive reviews of Centrify Express, and in the last 2 months there have been even more reviews that have confirmed that Centrify Express is the most functionally rich and stable free solution out there for Active Directory and *nix integration vis a vis alternative point tools. Let me highlight a few of the recent reviews.

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