Company: Vontu, San Francisco, California
Company Description: Vontu is the industry’s first Data Loss Prevention solution that protects confidential information, including customer data and intellectual property, from being sent outside the corporate network. Vontu helps reduce financial loss, including remediation costs and legal exposure, protect brand equity and customer loyalty, and ensure compliance.
Nomination Category: Company, Office & Product Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best New Product or Service

Nomination Title: Stopping ID THEFT and IP LOSS Cold!

   1. Tell the story of this nominated product or service (up to 500 words): its function, its features and benefits, and how it differs from competitive offerings. Include in your description the date in 2004 on which this product or service was introduced to the U.S. marketplace:

Insider security poses both a serious risk and a daunting challenge for large
organizations. Most loss of confidential data occurs when well-intentioned but
uninformed employees inadvertently send non-public information over insecure
channels. Other breaches occur when information is sent to inappropriate
recipients or stolen for personal profit.

Vontu 3.0, announced January 2004, acts as the security checkpoint at every exit
on the corporate network, monitoring e-mail, Web mail, Web posts, instant
messages, FTP and other electronic communications for sensitive information.
By accurately identifying incidents of information disclosure and security
policy violations as they happen, Vontu helps companies avoid lost customers,
public embarrassment, regulatory fines, lawsuits, and other consequences of
intentional or malicious data leaks.

Since security organizations already have to manage other threats, Vontu
provides powerful tools to determine the severity of breaches and rapidly
respond to and close incidents. Scalable, easy to integrate in your environment
and highly accurate, Vontu provides comprehensive monitoring at a low cost of
ownership for even the largest global organizations.

Vontu Protect at Work in the Fortune 500
Vontu Protect is aimed at reducing and ultimately preventing confidential data,
like customer records, from leaking out of a company through electronic means.
In deployments in Fortune 500 companies Vontu Protect has performed flawlessly,
identifying incidents automatically and accurately with no false positives.

• One retail brokerage firm reviewed archived emails to look for leakage of
non-public customer data. The firm found that more than 1% of all outbound
emails contained sensitive customer information. Although most incidents were
inadvertent, all were against company policy and some of the messages in the
wrong hands could have put the company or its customers at risk.

• A global retail bank is using Vontu Protect as the core of their NPI
(non-public information) leakage incident response program. The firm is
monitoring all outgoing SMTP, HTTP and FTP traffic, totaling over 10G per day.
Vontu Protect is currently deployed domestically in multiple data centers, and
will be rolled out on a global basis to monitor over 100,000 employees worldwide
later this year. Vontu Protect has scaled flawlessly in this very large,
geographically disperse organization.

• An investment banking firm is using Vontu Protect to check all outbound email
and FTP traffic for about 20,000 employees. Operating in real-time on more than
5 gigabytes of data each day, Vontu Protect has not caused any network
performance problems, or a single false positive: all incidents contain actual
confidential or non-public personal information.

• An insurance provider is employing Vontu Protect to protect more than 30
million customer and business partner records. This firm is also using the
product to look for confidential data in a wide range of documents, such as
Visio diagrams containing sensitive network information. Again, not a single
false positive has been found, enabling the security team to focus on actual
incidents, instead of looking for a needle in the haystack.

Customers have all noted that once Vontu Protect was installed, it provided them
with the opportunity to accurately document, for the first time, the amount of
sensitive, confidential, and customer data that is leaking out of their enterprise.

   2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. You may include links to product photos, service logos, etc. IMPORTANT: List each link on a separate line, begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.website.com]:

• In the last five years, businesses and financial institutions have suffered
losses of $48 billion  from identity theft alone, 
• Companies lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year in pirated
intellectual property, including leaked source code and design documents, 
• According to research gathered by Vontu over the past two years, one out of
every 500 email messages leaving large enterprises contains confidential
information such as customer data, employee data, financial information, or
intellectual property.
• Red Herring Selects Vontu for Top 100 Innovator Award
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/press_release_120904.html
• Vontu wins Computerworld’s Innovative Technology Award
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/press_release_091404.html
• Vontu’s CEO Joseph Ansanelli testifies before Congress on Identity Theft
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/itnews_cspan.html
• CNET News Article: Securing Data From the Threat Within
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/inews_011105_cnet.html
• USA Today Article
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/itnews_121304_usa.html
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/itnews_110104_cso.html
• Darwin Magazine Article – When Employees Are Risky to Your Business
http://www2.darwinmag.com/read/feature/jan05_ponemon.cfm
• Data Loss Prevention Market Stats
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/marketstats.html
• Industry Testimonials on Vontu
http://www.vontu.com/solutions/testimonials.html
• Vontu Implemented among the Fortune 500:
http://www.vontu.com/newsevents/press_release_011304.html

   3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that development this nominated product or service:

Joseph Ansanelli - Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder

Mr. Ansanelli has successfully co-founded and led two other companies and has an
extensive track record of developing innovative solutions into successful companies.
Most recently Mr. Ansanelli was the Vice President of Marketing at Kana
Communications, Inc. during which time the company went public and grew from $14 to $120 million in revenues with hundreds of Global 2000 customers. He joined
Kana in August 1999 in connection with Kana's merger with Connectify, a provider
of electronic direct marketing software that he founded and served as its CEO.

Joseph has testified before Congress twice on Identity Theft and Privacy. He has
recently been featured in the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, Forbes, CNET, and CNBC.  Joseph’s first Congressional testimony on June 24, 2003 focused on “Fighting Identity Theft – The Role of FCRA.” His second testimony on November 19, 2003 focused on “Cybersecurity & Consumer Data: What's at Risk for the Consumer?” 

Joseph holds four patents and received a B.S. in Applied Economics from the
Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.