Product Description

WebSpy Vantage empowers IT to prudently manage network resources, plan capacity, enforce usage policies and validate service levels. For the business, Vantage Giga provides valuable employee productivity and compliance reports.

Vantage’s key attribute lies in its ability to import and translate different types of log files, providing powerful, yet easy to use, drill down analysis capabilities with a comprehensive choice of meaningful reports. Vantage de-mystifies the raw and often highly complex data found in security and internet devices and present’s the user with meaningful management information.

Innovation

Log file analysers are used for range of online reporting requirements, such as user activity, website statistics, network performance and security. The problem is that a different analyser is often required to achieve each reporting requirement as they are hard coded to analyse a particular log type.

The WebSpy team has successfully addressed this issue by developing ‘Vantage’, a log analysis application that can intelligently and efficiently import and analyse different types of log files. Taking raw data and converting it into meaningful, actionable information for managers.

The Microsoft .NET framework was chosen as the development platform in order to utilise new developments such as reflection, dynamic IL (Intermediate Language) code generation, and generic types (generics).

This platform enables the team to write independent log file parsers (Loaders), that inform the Vantage application about how each log format should optimally be stored and analysed.

Vantage’s diversity is continually growing and evolving thanks to ‘Loader requests’ from WebSpy’s community of existing and potential clients. Log file support can often be added within 24 hours, and with automatic updates, all customers benefit from these additions and improvements.

This extensible architecture has made it possible for Vantage to achieve a diverse range of reporting needs across all industries and company sizes. WebSpy’s clients are reaping the rewards of using one application to achieve their reporting requirements, spending less on software maintenance, hardware and administration.

Vantage goes further beyond the call of duty with extra functionality not often found within log analysers, such as LDAP directory server integration, URL categorisation, search engine search term analysis, and task scheduling. Vantage also provides tools to interactively explore log file information, before scheduling customized reports.

The Vantage code base has been used to produce three WebSpy products; Vantage, Vantage Giga (the enterprise version), and WebSpy Insight for Microsoft SBS Premium – a reporting application specifically addressing the needs of Microsoft Small Business Server environments.

The WebSpy team worked within a culture that embraced risk and leveraged the ideas residing within the diverse skills and background of the team. There was also close collaboration with key clients and partners as well as our sales teams from the US and Europe to ensure that the solutions built encompassed the boldest and most varied ideas.

Performance

Vantage is successfully used today in organizations of all sizes, and its capabilities are being continually proven in enterprise environments around the world.

An example case study is Assedic/Unedic (The French government employment agency). This organization has over 15,000 users spanning across 650 remote sites generating about 10 GB of log file data per month. The organization implemented their own log format that combines user information from Apache (Web Servers) with web content categorisation information from ContentKeeper (Web blocking and filtering devices). The organisation is successfully generating about 120 reports each month providing Internet usage statistics for each level in the organizational hierarchy. This includes trend reports using the previous 6 months of data.

All Vantage Giga code adheres to Microsoft’s .NET Design Guidelines for Class Library developers. Vantage Giga is fully Unicode compliant, all setting files meet XML 1.0 W3C recommendations, and automatic updates comply with the W3C SOAP1.2 recommendations.

The first Vantage products were successfully beta tested and fully released in February 2006, with version 2.0 pending release in quarter 2 2007.

WebSpy’s ability to quickly implement log format support often exceeds customer expectations and has resulted in enthusiastic customer support. 

Potential

WebSpy products are designed for commercial international use. We have well established product sales in the Americas and EMEA and we very quickly get access to international markets on requirements and any nuances applicable to a particular country or region. Vantage has been designed to the Unicode ISO 10646 standard enabling support the world’s principal languages.

WebSpy has an established world market of over 5000 customers actively using our earlier products. Vantage was released in 2006 and is quickly establishing itself as an additional tool that offers clients much more insight into the use of their network. 

Because of its unobtrusive nature and its heterogeneous support of any security system or device, Vantage can be used by education, government, ISP’s, private enterprise and any industry without impeding or restricting end users in the use of the web and email.

The product is currently sold through our established channel of over 50 partners, some of which are distributors who sell through their partners. One example of this is Ingram Micro in the USA who sells all our product suites through their resellers. We also have master distributors in Asia, the Middle-East and France.

There is a strong take-up of the Vantage product globally with our existing clients as well as potential new clients.

Other information the judges should know

Please refer to Product data sheets and our Web site for additional information. A demo is also available on http://www.webspy.com/products/vantagegiga/demo/vantagedemo.html 

Vantage Giga Datasheet (pdf)