3 ms·

I went through a long drawn out sales engagement with them. It seemed like a cool product at its core (basically a sort of meshed set of interconnected nodes th

I went through a long drawn out sales engagement with them. It seemed like a cool product at its core (basically a sort of meshed set of interconnected nodes that you could do live "natural language" queries against predefined collected data (i.e. "what machines are running ntpd?") but the stuff they were trying to sell on top of it at the time like patch management ranged from half finished to promises for future releases to things that ended up simply... not being true. My perception at the time was that it was a good product for what it did but maybe after the demos were over too many potential customers said "so now what?" and they were putting pressure on engineering to release way too soon. And it turns out they were probably right, even though it was an obviously useful product for live reporting, detection and triage those things aren't appealing to managers so we didn't buy it.

posguy 10y ago
Yeah, I think Tanium's ultimate issues are their firing of employees to prevent vesting (and thus erosion of control of the company) and actions by the CEO whereby he berated an employee in front of the employee's team. You piss off your lower level employees, that builds resentment and causes employee churn, and if it was a habit of the CEO the other execs would likely jump ship as fast as possible (as they've been doing).
tptacek 10y ago
So... osquery?
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Yeah, pretty much. osquery plus some gossip-based node communication layered on top. Unless osquery has that or something like it these days. It's been a while since I kicked the tires on it.
- jonstewart 10y ago
  It supposedly has some kind of peer-to-peer topology for executing queries and aggregating the responses, so--I believe, I'm not certain--it avoids having a centralized data store that gets DDOS'd from the agents or a linear machine-by-machine connect-and-query model. That allows it to scale to large networks. The company _definitely_ benefited from the a16z lead-gen (and investment). Tanium was the big shiny endpoint tech of 2016, but I'm not convinced they have a good handle on the use cases/domain.
malenko 10y ago
I wish we worked at the same company. You're spot on with your comments.

posguy 10y ago

Yeah, I think Tanium's ultimate issues are their firing of employees to prevent vesting (and thus erosion of control of the company) and actions by the CEO whereby he berated an employee in front of the employee's team. You piss off your lower level employees, that builds resentment and causes employee churn, and if it was a habit of the CEO the other execs would likely jump ship as fast as possible (as they've been doing).

tptacek 10y ago

So... osquery?

brazzledazzle 10y ago
Yeah, pretty much. osquery plus some gossip-based node communication layered on top. Unless osquery has that or something like it these days. It's been a while since I kicked the tires on it.
jonstewart 10y ago
It supposedly has some kind of peer-to-peer topology for executing queries and aggregating the responses, so--I believe, I'm not certain--it avoids having a centralized data store that gets DDOS'd from the agents or a linear machine-by-machine connect-and-query model. That allows it to scale to large networks. The company _definitely_ benefited from the a16z lead-gen (and investment). Tanium was the big shiny endpoint tech of 2016, but I'm not convinced they have a good handle on the use cases/domain.

malenko 10y ago

I wish we worked at the same company. You're spot on with your comments.