In-Q-Tel buys monitoring app
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In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, has negotiated a license for event detection and response software that tracks information in multiple databases
In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, has negotiated a license for event detection and response software that tracks information in multiple databases.
Enterprise Agent Server from Agent Logic Inc. of Arlington, Va., can monitor databases, Web pages and applications and generate actions in response to events, an In-Q-Tel official said.
The software directly deals with 'the most daunting problems the intelligence community faces today'sharing and data monitoring across existing information systems,' In-Q-Tel chief executive officer Gilman Louie said in a statement. Louie called the product unique for rapid event detection and response 'across the broad spectrum of IT.'
In-Q-Tel acts as a technology scout for the CIA, taking equity stakes in companies whose technologies show promise for use by intelligence analysts.
Greg Pepus, director of federal and intelligence strategy for In-Q-Tel, said the CIA organization invested between $1 million and $3 million in Agent Logic. In return, In-Q-Tel received an enterprise license for CIA use as well as equity in Agent Logic.
Though he would not detail exactly how the CIA will use the product, Pepus said it would be useful to law enforcement officials who check immigration databases and terrorist watch lists when they stop motorists.
The application can pop up an alert on a user's screen when it detects a specific event in the databases, Web pages or other applications it is monitoring, Pepus said. 'It can do everything from updating databases, to running other software automatically, to acting as invisible hands on an application,' he said.
EAS sits above middleware, message queues and message buses as it monitors systems for events, Pepus said. 'That is not something you can do quickly' with other types of software, he said, because of having to write new code.
Agent Logic chief executive officer Michael Appelbaum said his company 'is doing work in the homeland security vein with a number of defense organizations.' He offered an example of security at ports, where the app could correlate information from ship manifests and other data to generate security warnings about vessels.
'If you have 10 different stovepipes,' EAS can check them all continuously, Appelbaum said. 'In a lot of cases, for event processing, people write custom code for what we do.'
Enterprise Agent Server, based on Java and Extensible Markup Language, works on Microsoft Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris platforms.
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