Raz-Lee Targets U.S. Market with iSeries Security Tools

Published: November 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Raz-Lee Security is quite serious when it comes to iSeries security software. At the same time the Israeli company is building out its suite of security software--which, through features like native OS/400 virus scanning, the company claims is the most complete package of OS/400 security tools--Raz-Lee is also laying a foundation in the competitive North American software market, where the company has signed nine resellers in less than two years.

It has been a busy year and a half for Eli Spitz, Raz-Lee's vice president of business development. Since taking the job in mid-2005, Spitz has been all over the world building reseller relationships for Raz-Lee, attending conferences, and generally evangelizing the company's dedication to OS/400 security and its products wherever they can get an audience.

While the majority of Raz-Lee's 12,000 customers reside outside the U.S. (EMEA has the biggest installed base of Raz-Lee customers, with companies like Fiat, Agfa, and Teva Pharmaceuticals), Spitz has focused a good percentage of his time on building a business base for Raz-Lee in the U.S., where the company's products are not as well recognized. One of his chief accomplishments in this regard was the hiring of industry veteran Mike Campbell, who has experience in the raucous OS/400 high availability market, to develop a North American reseller channel.

By all accounts, the combination of Campbell, who works out of his Dallas office, and Spitz, who splits his time between Raz-Lee's North American office in Nanuet, New York, and the company's headquarters in Herzliya, Israel, when he's not traveling, has succeeded in building a solid foundation of resellers across the continent.

Among Raz-Lee's recent channel-related accomplishments are a reseller partnership with Innovatum, an Atlanta, Georgia-based developer of auditing and change-tracking software for OS/400. This summer, the company signed another OS/400 ISV, SEA Software of New York, to sell its iSecurity suite alongside its own systems management tools and utilities for OS/400.

Raz-Lee signed numerous contracts with regional VARs over the summer, too, including the Genisys Group, a Franklin, Tennessee IBM business partner serving the Southeast, and Advantage International Systems, a Palm Harbor, Florida, iSeries reseller. But perhaps the biggest coup came when Raz-Lee signed a partnership agreement with Avnet, one of three master distributors for iSeries gear, and a channel-maker in its own right.

While it works on building software networks, the company hasn't shirked from building software, either, and has reason to boast when it comes to OS/400 tools. Raz-Lee offers more than 20 OS/400 products, split into two suites, including the iSecurity line of OS/400 security tools, and the Scope line of systems management tools and utilities. While the Scope line was Raz-Lee's original product line, it's the iSecurity suite that's generating headlines for the company today.

iSecurity

The iSecurity suite (formerly called Security+++, but the plusses were dropped about a year ago) is composed of 13 related products, including Firewall, Antivirus, Screen, Password Manager, Audit, Action, Capture, View, Visualizer, FileScope, Application Journal, User Profile Manager, and the Assessment tool. All of the tools can be purchased individually, or iSeries shops can buy them as an integrated package. The tools are also united because most of them can be accessed and used through green screens or a Java-based GUI.

The heart of the iSecurity suite is the Firewall product. This product does provide some traditional firewall functionality, such as incoming and outgoing TCP/IP address filtering, but it goes beyond what is normally associated with a firewall, and provides OS/400-specific capabilities, including governing access to OS/400 objects, controlling what actions users can take, and--perhaps most importantly--protecting OS/400 exit points. The product protects 53 exit points, which Raz-Lee claims is more than any other OS/400 security vendor, although there is some disagreement among the vendors as to what constitutes an individual exit point.

The second area that Raz-Lee claims sets its iSecurity suite apart from the pack is the Action component. Action is sort of a cross between an automated operations solution and an intrusion detection systems (IDS), and helps unite the various iSecurity products. "Action takes control when something happens somewhere else," Spitz says. "If we caught something in real time, instead of just sending an SMS or paging an operator, Action provides a closed loop system. You can start CL scripts, kick off users, or restart subsystems."

The Application Journal product is another area that Raz-Lee is fond of discussing. This product enables managers to see all the field-level changes that users have made in applications. "We're able to very quickly access these pieces of data and put them into a report, with before and after changes, and who changed it," Spitz says. "Auditors love this stuff."

Visualizer is another unique product, according to Raz-Lee. This piece of software provides a type of security "data warehouse" where users can slice and dice security-related information gathered by the Firewall and Audit components. It also allows them to look for exceptions and trends, such as which transactions were rejected, and which users are having rejected transactions. "Nobody else really has this," Spitz says.

Raz-Lee is also only one of two companies (along with Bytware) selling a native OS/400 antivirus solution. While the two companies butted heads earlier this year over Raz-Lee's decision to utilize the open source ClamAV antivirus scanning engine (Bytware uses the McAfee engine.), the fact remains that Raz-Lee and Bytware are the only companies to even attempt to offer this much-needed component of OS/400 security. The OS/400 user base would likely benefit from more competition and innovation in this area.

The most popular component of the iSecurity suite is the Assessment tool, which gives users a thorough understanding of their current state of security protection, or their lack thereof. While use of the Assessment tool doesn't always lead to an iSecurity suite sale, Spitz says C-level executives often snap to attention when they read how poor their security is in reports generated by the Assessment tool. "CFOs, CIOs, CEOs--there's got to be somebody who's picture appears in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times when the information gets out," he says. "It makes it a hot potato. The ball is in their court to do something about it."

In the months to come, Raz-Lee plans to unveil several new features, including centralized GUI and green-screen management of multisystem sites, and enhanced reporting and definition capabilities in the GUI environment, Spitz says.

Raz-Lee offers three iSecurity packages, including the Silver, Gold, and Platinum bundles. The Silver package includes Firewall, Audit, Visualizer, Password Manager, User Profile Manager, and Assessment. The Gold package adds Screen, Action, and System Control (or FileScope), to this bundle, while the Platinum package adds Antivirus. All other products, including Capture, View, and the Application Journal, are sold on an individual basis.

iSecurity version 12.5 is available now. Pricing is tier based, and ranges from about $4,000 to $60,000 or more. For more information, visit www.razlee.com.

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