As the RSA Conference 2011 security industry convention continues this week in San Francisco, HP is revealing how recent acquisitions in the security space are starting to bear fruit. On Tuesday, HP will demonstrate new security capabilities it is offering to protect enterprise networks and software applications, based on its acquisitions of Fortify Software and ArcSight in August and September of 2010, respectively.
The acquisitions bring "under one roof" security capabilities that work better together than they might have separately, says Michael Callahan, a marketing director for HP TippingPoint, a division created as a result of HP's 2009 acquisition of intrusion prevention vendor TippingPoint, a unit of 3Com.
HP will demonstrate at RSA how its technology can protect a fictional concert ticket Web site, Callahan says. In the scenario, a few purchasers scoop up all the tickets to a concert, put them in shopping carts but never check out, thus depriving everyone else of tickets.
Fortify software identifies an abnormality in the ratio of abandoned shopping carts to completed sales and sees "they're out of whack," he says. Then ArcSight discovers that all the purchasers came from the same IP address, also suspicious. Finally, TippingPoint sets up a filter blocking that IP address, which dumps the shopping carts and frees up the ticket inventory again.
"Here are customer problems that in the past we partially solved or had to come up with some creative ways of solving, but maybe didn't fully solve. But together we can solve it," Callahan says.
