Gigamon Acquired By Private Investors

The information network visibility firm Gigamon, Inc., has been acquired by the private investment firm Elliott Management and Qatar’s state-owned management fund Qatar Investment Authority for $1.6 billion. “With the acquisition complete, our team will continue to execute strategic initiatives that will both empower our customers with new, rich functionality and drive Gigamon to the next level of growth,” says Paul Hooper, the company’s CEO. “As a private company, we will continue to build upon our leading technology foundation and transform the market we created and lead.” Gigamon has customers in the financial services, healthcare, high technology and public sectors. The company’s software helps operators gain greater visibility of their networks for cyber security and monitoring purposes. “With our Security Delivery Platform, we are in a unique position to enable NetOps and SecOps teams to work together addressing the common goal of security their enterprise while containing costs and minimizing complexity,” Hooper says. Elliot’s investment is being led by its private equity affiliate, Evergreen Coast Capital.

British Airways Trialing Self-Service Biometric Boarding Gates at LAX

Using technology provided by Vision-Box, British Airways says it is the first airline to trial self-service biometric boarding gates on international flights out of Los Angeles Airport to London’s Heathrow Airport. The evaluation is being done with Customs and Border Protection. For the evaluation, British Airways is using face recognition technology to identify passengers, who won’t need to present their passport or boarding pass at the gate. The self-service gates have been installed on three stands at LAX. The project is being led by LAX and builds on technology already used by British Airways on its domestic flights from Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, which involves checking passengers’ biometric data at the gate when they scan their boarding pass. The technology evaluation at LAX is part CBP’s rollout of facial recognition under its biometric exit program to help monitor whether foreign nationals have overstayed their visas. JetBlue is also using face recognition in lieu of a boarding pass for a daily international flight from Boston’s Logan International Airport under the biometric exit program.

DHS S&T, Federal Partners Develop Tool to Test Aircraft Explosive Vulnerabilities

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, working with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army’s Aberdeen Test Center have developed a reusable Aircraft Explosive Testing Simulator to help with explosive testing of new generation commercial aircraft. S&T says that newer commercial aircraft have fuselages made with composite materials, which are less available and more expensive than legacy aluminum fuselage structures. This means a sustainable and representative testing solution needed to be developed. The simulator consists of a steel cylinder that can be pressurized to simulate conditions of an in-flight aircraft. Inside the cylinder, composite test panels can be installed and tested for various explosive threat scenarios. “The Aircraft Explosive Testing Simulator provides a rapid, reconfigurable and cost effective tool for acquiring test data on composite aircraft structural response to internal explosive threats,” says Nelson Carey, S&T’s Commercial Aircraft Vulnerability and Mitigation program manager.