Gigamon

Gigamon is a privately held computer security company with products that delivers network-derived intelligence and insights to cloud, security, observability, and network management tools. It is one of the main parts in the deep observability market. Formerly traded publicly, it is now owned by Elliott Management and headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

History
Gigamon LLC was founded in 2004 and was originally operated by Gigamon Systems, LLC. In 2009, Gigamon converted from a limited liability company to a corporation and changed its name to Gigamon Inc. It is currently led by President and CEO, Shane Buckley. In July 2012 the company filed for an IPO, and then went public on June 11, 2013, on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “GIMO”. During the initial public offering on June 12, 2013, investors bought 6.75 million shares priced at $19 each, generating $128 million in sales.

In 2015, Gigamon introduced its formalized Partner Program. At the time, the company already had 220 partners in North America and more in other countries. That same year, Gigamon moved its headquarters to Santa Clara and doubled the size of its operations.

Gigamon officials rang the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange on February 24, 2016. That year, Gigamon had almost $311 million in revenue, up from $68 million in 2011.

In January 2018, the company was acquired by Elliott Management Corporation and The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) for US$1.6 billion. That same year the company entered the network detection and response (NDR) market when it acquired the startup ICEBRG. In February 2022, the company announced a series of enhancements to ThreatINSIGHT that included providing 365-date rich network metadata retention to provide SOC teams with historical data and tools to use that data to identify adversary activity. In December 2022, Gigamon sold ThreatINSIGHT to Fortinet.

In 2019, Gigamon products were deployed in over 80% of Fortune 100 companies. Two years later, in December 2021, Gigamon partnered with Cirrus Networks to offer managed security services to governments and large enterprises in Australia. The initial three-year partnership focused on the following industries: government, mining, financial services, and education.

Products
Gigamon develops physical and virtual network visibility technologies, including network TAP and aggregation products, traffic manipulation applications, and visibility fabric nodes. Its product families have included Deep Observability (originally Hawk), GigaVUE (GigaVUE Cloud Suite and GigaVUE Appliances), GigaSMART, and GigaVUE-FM.

In 2014, the company added “Active Visibility” features to its visibility fabrics. With its Active Visibility, Gigamon could decrypt SSL traffic, better provide multi-tier security, and support 100 Gig-E and 40-Gig E networks.

In April 2015, the company released the framework Software Defined Visibility to be used by customers, security and network equipment vendors, and managed service providers. It can be used to control and program the Gigamon Visibility Fabric using REST-based APIs.  In July 2015, Gigamon released its GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform. It uses traffic visibility fabric to extract scalable metadata to counter Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

Another product, Application Filtering Intelligence, uses an application traffic identification tool to identify performance issues. It draws from a list of more than 3,000 IT and consumer apps, and sends relevant app traffic to security, performance monitoring, or data loss prevention tools.

In October 2021, Gigamon announced a joint solution with Armis, a device security platform provider. The Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric and Armis Agentless Device Security Platform are used together to provide full visibility into traffic across hybrid networks.

Deep Observability Pipeline
In 2021, Gigamon released Hawk, the first elastic visibility and analytics fabric for all data in-motion in a cloud network. It offered visibility-as-code that could be embedded into cloud automation. It was integrated with AWS and other cloud platforms and tools.

In 2022, the company relabeled Hawk, its main visibility platform, as a Deep Observability Pipeline. It is described as being able to deliver “network-derived intelligence to cloud, security and observability tools to help eliminate security blind spots and reduce tool costs.” It is used in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and accesses network traffic at the source.

In October 2022, Gigamon integrated its Pipeline with LogRhythm’s SIEM Platform. The integrated products can be used to identify behavioral anomalies, and internal and external cyber threats. In November, Gigamon announced a partnership with InfoVista to address “digital transformation and next-generation challenges in areas such as network slicing and service level agreement monetization across the 5G core, Open RAN and mobile private networks.”

Precryption
Gigamon Precryption™ technology is an automated solution that provides plaintext visibility into encrypted communications across cloud, virtual or container workloads. Gigamon GigaVUE 6.4 utilizes Precryption technology to execute advanced threat detection, investigation, and response. Precryption  was developed by Gigamon and was announced on September 12, 2023. Using eBPF technology, GigamonPrecryption technology captures traffic prior to encryption or after decryption to reveal previously concealed threat activity.

Vectra
Vectra AI Inc. and Gigamon announced a new OEM partnership. This new collaboration combines Vectra’s Ai-driven attack signal intelligence and Gigamon’s GigaVUE Cloud Suite throughout hybrid cloud environments. The platform reduces detection latency, reduces risk exposure, and optimizes Security Operations Center (SOC) within team workflows.

Lawsuits
On Friday, April 23, 2021, a federal jury of the US District Court and Eastern District of Texas delivered its verdict regarding Gigamon’s claims of APCON Inc.’s infringement on certain specified network technology patents. Gigamon’s infringement assertions were denied when the jury unanimously ruled that not only were allegations of APCON’s infringement invalid, but all claims related to five network data management patents at issue were invalid as well.