Today AlienVault, the sponsor company of the open source security intelligence tool OSSIM, announced that it has hired former HP Fortify team members Barmak Meftah and Roger Thornton. Meftah, who was VP of software security products at HP, is joining AlienVault as President and CEO. Thorton, founder of Fortify, is the new CTO of AlienVault.

Also joining AlienVault from Fortify are Jim Yares, Richard Kirk, John Richardson, Jack Marshall and Gail Boddy. According to AlienVault’s release:

Yares, formerly vice president & general manager of the Americas at HP Fortify, will serve as AlienVault’s executive vice president of global field operations. Kirk, formerly vice president & general manager of EMEA at HP Fortify, will serve as senior vice president of international sales. John Richardson, formerly vice president of finance at HP Fortify, will serve as vice president finance and administration. Marshall, formerly vice president of customer success at HP Fortify, will serve as vice president of customer success. Gail Boddy, former vice president of human resources at HP ArcSight, will serve as vice president of human resources of AlienVault.

Fortify was founded in 2002 and sold to HP for an undisclosed sum in August of 2010. Before the acquisition, Thorton served as CTO of Fortify and Meftah was chief of product. Since that time, the team has been a part of HP Enterprise Security. “It was a tough choice, moving away from HP, but the opportunity at AlienVault was too great to pass up,” Meftah told me in an interview.

OSSIM is a security information and event management (SIEM) solution, and AlienVault sells an enterprise version of the product along with support. It aggregates security event and log data to perform correlation and second order analysis to identify incidents that a security team should pay attention to. You can think of it as Splunk for security.

SIEM is a hot area. McAfee acquired NitroSecurity in October 2011 and IBM acquired Q1 Labs the same month. ArcSight was acquired by HP in October 2010, just two months after the Fortify acquisition. This is definitely an area to watch.