Centripetal wins historic $2.6-$3.2 Bil vs. Cisco Systems; largest US patent infringement award to date

Bob Gourley October 6, 2020

Editor’s note: I am proud to say I have a history with Centripetal Networks serving on their board and then later as an advisor. It was horrible to learn that a Tech Titan like Cisco was infringing on their patents. It is good now to see when the facts were reviewed justice was done. -bg

United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia Honorable Henry Coke Morgan, Jr. has issued Judgment in favor of Centripetal Networks after the conclusion of a 22-day bench trial in Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc., Case No. 2:18-cv-94. The ruling awards Centripetal $2.6 to $3.2 Billion, making this the largest award in a US patent infringement ruling to date.

Centripetal’s intelligence-driven cybersecurity solutions include the Threat Intelligence Gateway, which it leverages to deliver CleanINTERNET, a comprehensive intelligence-led cyber service.

This is the press release announcing the conclusion of this matter:

CENTRIPETAL NETWORKS AWARDED $2.6 TO $3.2 BILLION IN PATENT DAMAGES FOR CISCO’S WILLFUL PATENT INFRINGEMENT

Herndon, Virginia – October 6, 2020 — Yesterday, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Honorable Henry Coke Morgan, Jr. issued Judgment in favor of Centripetal Networks after the conclusion of a 22-day bench trial in Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc., Case No. 2:18-cv-94.

At trial, Centripetal Networks asserted that Cisco Systems (“Cisco”) infringed five U.S. patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 9,137,205 (“the ‘205 Patent”), 9,203,806 (“the ‘806 Patent”), 9,500,176 (“the ‘176 Patent”), 9,686,193 (“the ‘193 Patent”), 9,917,856 (“the ‘856 Patent”). Centripetal’s technology is designed to apply massively scaled intelligence to proactively defend internet connected networks. Centripetal innovated for the past decade and invested extensively to develop each component of its suite of security technologies. The company developed an intelligence driven security gateway branded RuleGATE® which enables a powerful cost-effective service called CleanINTERNET®. This layer of protection makes it extremely difficult for an attacker to penetrate and exploit legitimate networks.

Yesterday afternoon, the Court issued a 178-page Opinion and Order, detailing its findings that Cisco willfully infringed four of the five asserted patents, awarded damages of $755,808,545 (enhanced 2.5 times for willful infringement), prejudgment interest of $13,717,925, which resulted in a total past damages award in an amount of $1,903,239,288. The Court also awarded a running royalty of 10% on the apportioned sales of the accused products and their successors for a period of three years, followed by a second three-year term with a running royalty of 5% on such sales, resulting in a total damages award of $2,657,941,011 to $3,253,585,041. The damages award is the largest award of any U.S. patent case to date.

“The Court’s ruling affirms the opportunity for innovative companies like ours to develop solutions for the largest market opportunities,” said Steven Rogers, CEO of Centripetal Networks. “We’ve worked toward a paradigm shift in security through our development of the fundamental technologies behind CleanINTERNET. We believe these technologies are important for the country. Without the protection of a patent an emerging company could never take on big important challenges like these. We are grateful to the court for affirming this.”

“So many in our company have worked in communications security and intelligence their entire careers,” said Jonathan Rogers, COO of Centripetal Networks. “We offer the best and most advanced intelligence solutions on the market. From this point forward we will continue to add researchers, engineers, and security analysts to the Centripetal team. We want to ensure the problem of cyber-security is marginalized and we’re going to make the investments necessary to do that.”

About Centripetal
Centripetal delivers intelligence-driven security. Centripetal invented the Threat Intelligence Gateway and leverages its technologies to deliver CleanINTERNET, a comprehensive intelligence-led cyber service. With Centripetal, customers across every vertical and of every size can persistently prevent over 90% of known threats with intelligence applied in advance. Gartner, Inc. previously named Centripetal a “Cool Vendor” in security for 2017, the Security Innovation Network (SINET) named Centripetal a “SINET-16” awardee, and was ranked number 93 of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s 2019 Technology Fast 500™. Centripetal’s technology is protected by over 50 US and international patents and is deployed protecting critical networks globally. For more information, visit www.centripetal.ai.

Copyright © 2020 Centripetal Networks Inc. All rights reserved. CleanINTERNET, RuleGATE, QuickThreat, AI-Analyst, ACT, and the Centripetal design are registered trademarks of Centripetal Networks Inc. Centripetal’s products and technologies are covered by multiple U.S. and international patents. For a full list and for more information, please visit www.centripetal.ai/legal. All other names and trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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Cisco Systems, Inc

Research Team September 10, 2020

We know Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) really well and you probably do too. So we almost didn’t include them in our list of tech firms here. They are one we all need to watch all the time anyway.

But we thought it was important to remind you, even though it is stating the obvious, that Cisco has a great track record of innovating themselves and of buying innovative companies. In just about any market assessment you are doing regarding communications you should review the latest from Cisco.

Cisco Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures, and sells Internet protocol (IP)-based networking and other products related to the communications and information technology (IT) industry and provide services associated with these products and their use. It provides a line of products for transporting data, voice, and video within buildings, across campuses, and around the world. Its products are designed to transform how people connect, communicate, and collaborate.

For more see http://cisco.com

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Amazon AWS: Dominating In Cloudcomputing, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and IoT

Research Team August 13, 2020

We have been tracking Amazon for years, but as a reference point consider that in November 2006 BusinessWeek ran a cover story with the title “Jeff Bezos’ Risky Bet” where the concept of cloud computing as a business model disruptor was catapulted into the mainstream. Since then the risky bet has paid off for Amazon and has helped transform the business ecosystem in ways few could have predicted.

The power of the AWS cloud is now driving continuous advancements in Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and IoT.

In Artificial Intelligence, one fantastic real-world capability is the AI enabled Amazon Echo, which is really the closest thing you can get to a Star Trek computer.

In IoT, Amazon is providing a means to control and configure IoT devices with easy to use graphical interfaces. They call this feature Amazon IoT. This can be used to control large scale IoT deployments or smaller scale home capabilities (for example, you can buy a home IoT experiment kit from Amazon called the Intel Edison and control that by Amazon IoT, a great way to learn).

Amazon considers cloud computing to be the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Others may use different definitions but Amazon is the 500lb gorilla so for this post at least we will say we agree!

Every year the re:Invent conference provides a good snapshot of Amazon AWS capabilities. The good news is you can find plenty of information on every capability. The bad news is there are over 2000 services being delivered via the cloud, and every one of them is evolving and adding new features.

Re:Invent 2019:

Re:Invent 2018:

Here is a snapshot of some more interesting capabilities:

Amazon launched a service called AWS RoboMaker. This leverages the increasingly standard ROS (Robot Operating System) and provides a cloud robotics service that makes it easy to develop, test, deploy and manage intelligent robotics applications at scale (an intro video is embedded at the end of this post).
The AWS Snowball and Snowball Edge are evolving at a faster pace than many of us expected. Initially the Snowball was a great way to move data from enterprises to the Amazon cloud. Load the data on the device and ship it. This is still a key use case. But newer versions of the device (the Snowball Edge) included enough processing power to do compute on the edge, meaning many analytics could be done on data before moving it to the cloud. The device soon evolved to be a mini-Amazon instance that can be used in disconnected locations. A key thing that enterprises can do with this new version: The extra CPUs and GPUs now enable on site, local Machine Learning (ML) and local analytics. Yep, these things are AI in a box. And this includes very high end advanced analytics like image processing and full motion video analysis. For more see A New AWS Snowball Edge Provides The Power Of The Cloud In Disconnected Environments.
New cloud based services for satellite command and control and space operations (See AWS Ground Station). Yes the same firm that gets any retail product you want to your door can now be used to set up the ground stations to control your satellites with on demand cloud based services. That is the good news. The bad news is this capability can also be used by anyone else with a credit card. Time to start thinking through the nightmare scenarios of space again (I should update this article I just wrote: In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream).
AWS is delivering an increasing portfolio of services and capabilities to support Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. For a good overview see this Forbes article.
The way Amazon trains its own developers in Machine Learning and related AI is now opened up to any of us via their Amazon Machine Learning University.
AWS is enabling Blockchain (See Blockchain on AWS). I love this. Great way to leverage benefits of blockchain. But on the other hand, I would remind you that many of the greatest use cases of blockchain are those that are designed to get “the man” out of the way. Increasingly, Amazon is “the man” so do you really want to use them for your Blockchain based solution?
AWS Outposts was announced (with VMware) to bring AWS hardware and API design into enterprise datacenters. This is huge! iT shows the cloud competition is moving into your datacenter on-prem. This will set off a new competition. Watch for Google to finally wake up and find ways to offer similar solutions. And watch for Microsoft gloating since they have known this approach is important for years.

What do you do with all this new information? Clearly we all have to keep learning (CTOvison will help on that end, sign up to our newsletters to stay informed). But, more importantly, we need to think through the business impact of these many changes. Consider:

How can these changes accelerate your new products to market?
How might these cause new competitors to arise?
Will these new solutions and services open new avenues of attack to your data or open new risks that need to be mitigated?
How should you be training your workforce to take advantage of these capabilities?

For more on Amazon’s capabilities in Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and IoT see:

For competitors search our Solutions Directory:

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Couchbase: The NoSQL Database Leader

Research Team February 14, 2020

Couchbase is the NoSQL database market share leader, with production deployments at AOL,Deutsche Post, NTT Docomo, Salesforce.com, Starbucks, Turner Broadcasting Systems, Vimeo, Zynga, and hundreds of other global enterprises. Couchbase Server, our NoSQL database offering, delivers a more scalable, high-performance and cost-effective approach to data management than relational database technology. It is particularly well suited for storing the data behind web applications deployed on modern virtualized or cloud infrastructures.

Get the gist of what is up with Couchbase in this video:

Couchbase is sponsor of the Couchbase Server NoSQL database open source project. The engineering team includes the core committers and leading contributors to this project and to its upstream open source projects: Apache CouchDB and memcached.

Led by a seasoned team of Silicon Valley executives, Couchbase offers commercially licensed and supported versions of Couchbase Server. The firm supports:

Social gaming: Zynga, Pokemon, Quepasa, Antic Entertainment, Buffalo Studios, Gamegos, Gamingos, Meteor Games, Nexon, Playtika, Scoreloop, Shuffle Master, Sojo Studios, Tribal Crossing, VNG, Vostu
Advertising: AOL, MediaMind, BurstaBit, Chango, Cognitive Match, Dotomi, Nami Media, TubeMogul, Xclaim
Communications: NTT Docomo, Orange France Telecom, VodafoneCisco, ITT, Korea Telecom
Business services: Salesforce.com, Thomson Reuters, ADP, Concur, Deutsche Post DHL, LG CNS, Navteq
E-commerce: Starbucks, Skechers, Ganz, Kobo, Skyscanner, The Knot
Social networking: SmugMug, Vimeo, mig33, Spotme, Tango, The Ladders, Tunewiki, Umami TV,
Automotive: American Honda, BMW, Manheim

Learn more here: http://www.couchbase.com/

Basis Technology: Extracting Meaningful Intelligence from Multilingual Text

Research Team February 7, 2020

Basis Technology provides software solutions for extracting meaningful intelligence from unstructured text in Asian, European and Middle Eastern languages. They help technology companies and government organizations improve the accuracy of information retrieval, text mining and other applications through advanced linguistics.

Basis Technology provides software solutions for text analytics, information retrieval, digital forensics, and identity resolution in over forty languages. The Basis Rosette® linguistics platform is a widely used suite of interoperable components that power search, business intelligence, e‑discovery, social media monitoring, financial compliance, and other enterprise applications.

The company is at the forefront of applied natural language processing using a combination of statistical modeling, expert rules, and corpus-derived data. Leading software vendors, content providers, financial institutions, and government agencies worldwide rely on Basis Technology’s solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, entity extraction, name indexing, and name translation.

Their products and services are used by over 250 major firms, including Cisco, EMC, Exalead/Dassault Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec. Our text analysis products are widely used in the U.S. defense and intelligence industry by such firms as CACI, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, and SRI. We are the top provider of multilingual technology to web and e-commerce search engines, including Amazon.com, Bing, Google, and Yahoo!.

For a good overview of the company see this video from CEO Carl Hoffman:

Learn more here: http://www.basistech.com/

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Carahsoft and GitLab Partner To Help Feds Deliver Code To Production Quickly and Securely

Bob Gourley April 24, 2019

Editor’s note: When we see any press release by a member of the Carahsoft family we take note. Some, like the one on GitLab below, seem to be of particularly high interest to federal technologists.- bg

SAN FRANCISCO and RESTON, Va., April 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – GitLab, the single application for the software development lifecycle, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, today announced a partnership to help federal, state and education IT teams accelerate their code delivery processes. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as GitLab’s master government dealer and distributor, making the company’s industry-leading product available to the public sector via Carahsoft’s NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) Contract, National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint and National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA) cooperative purchasing vehicles.

“By partnering with Carahsoft, GitLab is looking forward to helping public sector agencies deliver code to production quickly and securely,” said Paul Almeida, Director, Public Sector Sales at GitLab. “By working closely with public sector organizations, GitLab hopes to help streamline code delivery for government agencies. GitLab’s enterprise-grade source code management, code review, continuous integration, continuous delivery, application security and application monitoring tools remove traditional roadblocks to collaboration and accelerate the development process.”

Carahsoft and GitLab’s partnership makes GitLab’s proven software development application available to help federal, state and education IT teams optimize code development and delivery, helping public sector agencies ship code quickly and securely. GitLab is a single application for the entire software development lifecycle. From project planning and source code management to CI/CD and monitoring, GitLab has optimized organizations’ software development lifecycles and improved turnaround time by 200%.

GitLab helps software development teams collaborate and work from a single conversation on a single application, instead of managing multiple threads across disparate tools. GitLab provides teams a single data store, one user interface and one permission model across the DevOps lifecycle, enabling government IT teams to collaborate reduce cycle time and focus exclusively on building software that empowers their missions.

“Carahsoft and our reseller partners look forward to empowering the Public Sector with the tools to support their software development needs,” said Natalie Gregory, Vice President of Carahsoft. “As agency missions evolve and their technology stacks modernize, they require tools that allow them to accelerate the time to value in their application development process. In offering GitLab, we look forward to solving the public sector’s challenges of tomorrow by centralizing the entire development lifecycle and shortening the time to market of new software.”

GitLab’s solutions are available via Carahsoft’s SEWP V contracts NNG15SC03B and NNG15SC27B and NASPO ValuePoint and NCPA cooperative purchasing vehicles. For more information, contact the GitLab team at Carahsoft at (877) 742-8468 or GitLab@Carahsoft.com.

About GitLab

GitLab is a single application built from the ground up for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle for Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project. GitLab provides teams a single data store, one user interface, and one permission model across the DevOps lifecycle, allowing teams to collaborate and work on a project from a single conversation, significantly reducing cycle time and focus exclusively on building great software quickly. Built on open source, GitLab leverages the community contributions of thousands of developers and millions of users to continuously deliver new DevOps innovations. More than 100,000 organizations from startups to global enterprise organizations, including Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, NASDAQ, Dish Network, and Comcast trust GitLab to deliver great software at new speeds.

100 Percent Of Small Businesses Go Out Of Business One Nanosecond After the Simplest of Cyberattacks

Bob Gourley March 21, 2019

I just read another scary marketing email. This one from one of my favorite firms. I love Cisco. They have done a great deal for America and our way of life and I really appreciate them. They are creators and innovators and I am honored to have interacted with Cisco through the years.

But their marketing team has fallen for the trap so many other marketing firms have. They are spreading mis-truths, probably because they want to believe that what they heard somewhere is true.

A recent note from them tells me that:

“In fact, more than four out of 10 cyberattacks target small businesses, and 60% go out of business within six months of an attack. “

Wow, this is a pretty serious fact.

Sounds an awful lot like a fact many of us in the community recognized as bullshit when we first heard it back in 2011. Can you imagine if 60% of businesses that had a cyber attack went out of business? Given that we are all pretty much under attack all the time, we would not have any businesses left would we?

So I went to Google and did a bit of searching to see if I could back up Cisco’s claim.

Best overview I saw spelling out how specious their statement is is at a BankInfoSecurity article from May 2017. The statistic seems to have no basis in fact. But some people said it. That is all.

For marketing teams everywhere, try this one on:

100 percent of small businesses go out of business one nanosecond after the simplest of cyberattacks.

I happen to know that one is B.S. because I just made it up. But from now on whenever I see a marketer use that tired old made up statistic about 60% of businesses I am going to try correcting them with my new statistic and see if they will use my number instead of theirs. Or maybe it will cause them to think a bit more before spreading their own specious content.

OK enough poking fun at marketing departments around the world. I actually feel for them, they have a really hard job. They need to find ways to stand out in an environment where 1,000’s of firms are competing for the attention of every decision-maker in the enterprise. It is a tough job. I would just encourage all in the marketing department to stay grounded in reality by being sure to check facts, and, whenever possible, run your marketing copy by the business side of your organization to get their inputs.

SwiftStack: Private cloud storage innovation

Research Team October 4, 2018

Swiftstack has been acquired by NVIDIA

Based in San Francisco, SwiftStack innovations power private cloud storage for enterprises. SwiftStack delivers the benefits of public cloud storage offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others, but runs behind the enterprise firewall within your custody on infrastructure that your internal IT teams control.

For more due diligence on SwiftStack and to evaluate SwiftStack competitors see the CTOvision Disruptive IT Directory Infrastructure Companies section.

For an overview of the SwiftStack architecture see:

Built on an open-source core, SwiftStack software is installed on standard server hardware, creating a scale-out cluster that is addressable over file services or via object APIs within and across your data centers.

With pay- as-you-grow licensing and freedom to choose preferred hardware infrastructure, SwiftStack enables the ability to start small and seamlessly scale huge. These unique cloud storage characteristics bene t data- centrical applications including archiving active data, serving web content, building private clouds, sharing documents, and storing backups. SwiftStack powers storage for eBay, HudsonAlpha, and Pac-12 Networks among many F500 companies, as an open solution that not only meets their applications needs today but also for tomorrow.

For more see: SwiftStack.com

Also see: