Mike Fratto wrote an interesting article debating whether NAC is ready for primetime or not, and, unsurprisingly, Mike Rothman congratulates MikeF for having the "stones" to take that position. Personally I don't think this is about stones, pebbles or grains of sand. MikeF makes some very valid points about the readiness of NAC products to address a broad set of use cases in diverse enterprise environments, but he also makes some great points about the readiness of IT teams to implement the technology. In fact in my reading of his article, I think MikeF raises more points about the readiness of Enterprise IT teams for NAC than the products themselves. This is an important point that I think MikeR has missed in this and several of his previous posts. The reality is that just as products have to mature, customers also have to come up to speed on what this new technology can do for them in their environment. The good news is that customers are coming up to speed and fast. Not only that, but they are recognising the potential of the technology and helping to redefine and extend NAC. What's really gratifying is that NAC has evolved more and more into the vision of LAN Security that we set out more than 2 years ago. So, let's get this straight, it's a good thing when our customers come to us and tell us what they need. Sometimes we see a trend that can be applied across many customers and we embrace it because it means we can add value that people will be willing to pay for. We also innovate and take ideas and features back to customers because we think we have seen a way to help that perhaps the customer didn't think technically possible. In this manner, products and markets evolve and the reason I have remained on the vendor side of the industry is because their is no bigger kick than seeing your product being used to solve a problem or create an initiative that wasn't possible before. We are lucky enough to be closely plugged into early adopters and are not only seeing our rate of customer acquisition increase at a very healthy rate, but also a huge increase quarter by quarter in the number of RFI/RFPs that we are being invited to respond to. While not everyone is ready to roll out corporate wide today, many are certainly biting off managable high priority projects and deploying pilots. Our customers range from specific projects with Fortune 100's to full global deployments with large enterprises and campus deployments with medium enterprises. This is perhaps "security incite" that the two Mike's are not a party to so they assume that things aren't moving along. So come on guys, less of the negativity, and start writing about the cool things customers are already doing with our technology rather than the nits about what can't be done. As one of our customers said, "Look at the problem you want to solve, find a vendor who's thinking the same way and that you can partner with and jump in with both feet". If we all sat around waiting for everything to be perfect we'd still be living in caves.
//Dom
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