Northern.tech

northern.tech

Northern.tech builds a suite of easy-to-use security products for the connected world. Each product shall not only be a single-purpose product, but also complement each other to give their customers the option to pick and choose the products that best fit their needs. Their products shall address the needs of everyone from small companies to large enterprises worldwide. MENDER provides a secure and robust over-the-air (OTA) software update management solution for embedded devices and the Internet of Things (connected devices) across horizontal markets. The unique benefits of Mender lie in security and robustness guarantees for devices to stay operational as they receive software updates, a very delicate and nuanced process. Even in the case of a devastating event such as sudden power or network loss during an update, Mender will be able to recover and restore the device into a well-known good running state. The open core business model offers minimal barriers for embedded and IoT developers to adopt and start using Mender. Mender’s focus on ease of use provides quick time-to-value, allowing developers to focus on their product’s core features. CFEngine is a large-scale software solution that helps system administrators and other stakeholders in large IT organizations to become more agile and respond faster to business requirements while ensuring SLAs and regulatory compliance. CFEngine, the inventor of infrastructure-as-code, allows users, in code using the domain-specific language (DSL) of CFEngine, to define desired states of their IT infrastructure. Lightweight CFEngine agents continuously ensure that the actual states are converging toward the desired states, and report desired and actual states. The solution is built upon Promise Theory. Written in C, CFEngine runs on multiple platforms and architectures, from the smallest embedded devices to large servers and mainframes, easily handling tens and hundreds of thousands of resources. Many DevOps organizations use CFEngine to ensure consistency across different environments and automated application deployment. Due to its strong security track record, CFEngine is widely used in regulated industries like financial services, telecom, health care, and governmental agencies. The solution comes in a free open-source Community Edition and paid commercial Enterprise Edition, also leveraging the open core model.