Founded in 1987, FullArmor Corporation has grown to be a leading provider of enterprise policy management on the Windows platform. FullArmor delivers innovative, leading-edge solutions that extend the native capabilities of Microsoft's Active Directory, Group Policy, and PowerShell to manage, secure, and policy-enable virtualization technologies.
In 1993, Wal-Mart asked if the FullArmor product could help them prevent kids from trashing the demo PCs in its stores. In response, FullArmor built a Windows 3.1-based prototype and Wal-Mart agreed to purchase the finished product. After Wal-Mart, the product was purchased by other retailers, including Sam's Club, Circuit City, Costco, The Good Guys! and Future Shop. The introduction of Windows 95 led to a new version of the product that leveraged the company's experience with retail stores and helped win OEM customers, including Compaq, HP, Sony, Fujitsu and Toshiba.
As companies began to migrate to the Windows operating system, they faced many of the same issues that the retailers had faced. Users made unauthorized configuration changes that resulted in an increased support burden. In 1995, Netscape, Oracle and Sun proclaimed Windows as too expensive for companies. The future of computing, as they saw it, was thin client, browser-based desktop computing. At about the same time, Gartner was evangelizing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept and the ways that savings could be achieved.
In response, the company shifted its development focus to the corporate market. Danny Kim extended the Wal-Mart/retail solution by using system policy to manage Windows 95/98/NT PCs. This allowed companies to protect PCs from errant user changes and thereby reduce the TCO. Gartner did an analysis on the Tennessee Valley Authority's 10,000 PCs that showed that FullArmor Zero Administration provided TCO savings of $1,200.00 per PC per year. The FullArmor Zero Administration product became FAZAM NT and was purchased by hundreds of companies in the following years.
In 1998, Microsoft announced that their next operating system would include Group Policy, a much expanded and improved means of using policy to secure and configure PCs. Danny Kim met with the Group Policy team in September, 1998 to explore partnering opportunities. Microsoft was very receptive to working with the company to solve the Group Policy management and reporting challenges faced by their customers. Microsoft introduced the company to several large customers, including Microsoft's Internal Technology Group (ITG), Boeing, Shell and Bank of America. At the end of the year, the company changed its name to FullArmor Corporation to capitalize on the wide recognition of the FullArmor brand name in the market.
FullArmor released FAZAM 2000 in response to the input of Microsoft and their large customers in February, 2000. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft ITG became the first FAZAM 2000 customer. Later that year, Microsoft licensed a "Reduced Functionality Version" of FAZAM 2000 for their Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit. As organizations began to adopt Windows 2000 and implement Group Policy, many large companies, such as Boeing, Shell and Bank of America, purchased FAZAM 2000.
In 2002, FullArmor and NetIQ concluded an OEM agreement and NetIQ began marketing FAZAM 2000 as Group Policy Administrator (GPA). More large companies became customers, including U. S. Air Force, CIA, FBI, Lockheed, Lehman Brothers, GlaxoSmithKline, Washington Mutual and Transportation Security Agency. To meet the needs of customers for offline Group Policy change management, FullArmor added the GP Repository and change management workflow to FAZAM 2000.
FAZAM Auditing was released in 2003 to provide real-time monitoring and alerting of changes to Group Policy Objects (GPOs) Initially, it was integrated with Microsoft Operations Manager. Later in the year FullArmor and NetIQ concluded another OEM agreement and NetIQ re-branded FAZAM Auditing as Group Policy Guardian (GPG). GPG was integrated with NetIQ Security Manager and AppManager.
By early 2004, the installed FAZAM 2000/GPA base was 4 million seats in 65 countries. FullArmor sold FAZAM 2000 and FAZAM Auditing to NetIQ to focus on developing extensions to Group Policy. In response to the need to secure and manage Windows 2000 and Windows XP desktops attached to non-Active Directory networks, FullArmor introduced GPAnywhere. GPAnywhere allowed companies to create "portable policies" to enforce corporate polices beyond the reach of Active Directory. Late in 2004, FullArmor introduced IntelliPolicy for Clients. IntelliPolicy for Clients brought "intelligence" to Group Policy processing and allowed companies to increase the security of Windows 2000/XP PCs by carefully targeting the application of Group Policy settings.
In 2005, FullArmor introduced PolicyPortal to provide global endpoint security and configuration. PolicyPortal gave administrators the ability to use the Internet to secure and configure all endpoints - those outside Active Directory and those inside Active Directory.
In 2006 FullArmor sold IntelliPolicy for Clients to NetIQ.
FullArmor Endpoint Policy Manager was released in March, 2007. Endpoint Policy Manager automates the delivery, enforcement and auditing of critical security policies on mobile, disconnected and unmanaged endpoint devices, including guest machines with temporary access to the corporate network.
