NAC: priceless after all these years

As an interested customer in

As an interested customer in the access control marketplace, it constantly amazes me how the same vendors keep on bashing each other with their differing market positioning on NAC. It's getting tiring to read the personal attacks between Michele Mclean and Alan Shimel, and Alan Shimel and everyone else. Clearly these folks have too much spare time on their hands. if the market they represent was really moving with such traction, they wouldn't have the time to spew this crap because they would be dealing with a set of stake-holders called CUSTOMERS.

On a separate note, I think its clear to most people (outside of these bloggers) that the pre-connect NAC solution many of these vendors are pushing is already yesterday's news. Pre-connect NAC exists in multiple formats in a slew of products today. They real technical challenge, in this user's humble opinion, is how to provide line-rate post-connect security within network infrastructure. This will include IPS (not just anomaly detection), 5-Tuple firewall and application visualization.

Serious vendors need to have conversations on serious topics. Next generation switches will be application aware and will have in-built security - FOR FREE. If Messers Shimel & Ashley are indeed providing pre-connect NAC for free, then I applaud them. Now we are beginning to get into serious dialogue.

1 final point: I sat in a presentation in NYC with Michele last year were she claimed 180 customers. I have since seen this number presented a number of times. Now she claims she is about to announce her 150th customer. My question is, how could you have lost 30 customers in the last 6 months? I suggest its more important to go find them than spending your time blogging!!

Free as in desperate or free

Free as in desperate or free as in shaking up the NAC market? Just by reading some of the other NAC vendors replies I think I know what my conclusion will be. I don't like to see vendors bash each other even though its great for entertainment value.

But, if anything it does look like StillSecure is one vendor confident enough in the product to let anyone use it. Will be interesting to see if the strategy they are taking will pay off. Seems to be doing a decent job over at Sourcefire or wait are they just desperate as well?

It is not often that Dan

It is not often that Dan Clark and I agree on NAC. But in this case I do agree. Dan, we think the free product has some "value" but lets be clear, we see a way of getting some portion of the free users to become paid users. Otherwise we would have a tough time staying in business with that model. I am sure that some folks will find tremendous value in the free product alone, but I question if the value they find is in "nac" or just posture assessment. This does follow in our strategy around Strata Guard Free and Cobia of giving away software. We think it works in todays markets and we have had success with them.

One last thing, the joker who wrote in as "Mitch" Ashley, is not Mitchell Ashley from StillSecure, just some joker too afraid to step out and use his or her real name. You should remove that comment or at least note that it is a fraud.

Eric, Lockdown wouldn't go

Eric,

Lockdown wouldn't go after the market the way StillSecure has chosen to, as most customers take "free" software with a grain of salt. In this case, price is a function of the value of the stripped down offering and what I expect Allan sees as the opportunity cost of trying to open new accounts.

The net is this is not an indictment of NAC, it's a sales tactic. Just like "free bundled antivirus software."

The point you raise about "infrastructure" is really important. There's a lot the could be said, but I don't want to be a blog-hog, so I'll save most of it for our site, except to say this: NAC has the potential to participate in and leverage existing infrastructure, not to replace it.

We think that the only effective way to automate access control policies is to interoperate with current and future systems, not to try to be all things to all people. This approach enables the policy capabilities that enterprises require to go beyond the trivial "conference room" scenario you mention, and to deploy NAC based on the state of devices, state of the network, identity, and other critical considerations.

Listen up sweetheart. We

Listen up sweetheart. We practically invented NAC years ago, I think we know what it is about and what it's not about. We know the market. Just wait until we IPO or sell the company for $16 or maybe even $17 million, see who's laughing then, Michelle.

To quote the earlier

To quote the earlier comment: "This is not a wake-up call. Its a message of desperation." Hasn't StillSecure offered a free version of their IDS/IPS solution Strata Guard for quite some time? It seems like they are just building upon a strategy that has worked in the past; not desperation. I think that this "Lite" release speaks to a lot of pain customers are feeling that are trying to implement a NAC solution.

Eric- I wish you would have

Eric- I wish you would have spoken to us before writing your article, would have liked to give you some background on what we think here. However, I know we are on to something just by how loud Michelle is bitching about it ;-) I have written more about her "size matters" argument on my blog here.