startupmania

IBM is set to announce next week that it will purchase the Israeli start-up company Guardium for over $200 million. Guardium supplies internet-database security solutions. Sources closely related to the deal have corroborated it to People and Computers.

Guardium develops solutions that offer secure access to organizational databases, including Microsoft, Oracle and Sybase. Its flagship product is GuardSQL, which provides database security and management services, along with a solution to different regulatory demands.

Guardium was founded in 2002, following a split from software company Log-On. As of 2003, Guardium operates out of Boston, with no activity in Israel. Its founders are Amnon Keynan, a former VP at Amdocs, and Lior Tal. The company employs over 100 employees, and its VP of technologies is Dr. Rob Ben-Natan, who also serves as a “gold” advisor for IBM.

For Guardium, this is a significant success in a venture capital aspect, as it has only seen investments of less than $20 million, by Israeli funds Cedar Advisors, Veritas, StageOne and American fund Ascent.

IBM has made several start-up purchases in Israel in the last decade, spending hundreds of millions of dollars. The biggest purchase of all was XIV, which develops a grid-computing based storage system, for $300 million. When asked about the Guardium purchase, IBM representatives responded that they “do not comment on rumors.”

A recent research by Verizon states that attacks on organizational database servers amount to 75% of all attacks on organization’s IT components, and 2009 saw an increase in such attacks. According to IBM, SQL Injection attacks have seen a sharp spike – a 50% increase in the first quarter as opposed to the last quarter of 2008, and doubled in the second quarter of 2009 in comparison to the second quarter of 2008. SQL Injection is a system in which a program security breach is utilized by addressing the database by a remote user with illegal queries. These can reveal confidential data from the database, cause it to malfunction and even assist the assailant with a complete takeover of the database.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum