Jon’s Network

Interesting post by Alan Shimel of Stillsecure.  I guess Lockdown Networks marketing guy said at RSA how great Lockdown is because it is a purpose-built NAC appliance and Alan called him on it, as did Mitchell Ashley, saying that Lockdown was originally a vulnerability scanner.  My own experience with Lockdown from a reseller’s perspective confirms everything that these two Stillsecure fellows have written.  When I began working with Lockdown, they were a vulnerability scanner, and some of my prospects and customers were interested since it wasn’t a per scan pricing model and it integrated with their help-desks.  I only sold one of their Auditor units in 2004.  Another customer tested it but said he didn’t need it since he already ran Nessus.  Well, later that year Lockdown morphed into a NAC company and released the Enforcer.  They upgraded my customer’s box to an Enforcer but thereafter it never worked with his Cisco switch (supposedly it worked on the identical test switch but not the production switch).  He spent too much time messing with it and sent it back just to get it out of his life.  I guess it was sometime that year that I noticed Lockdown was always announcing how much VC they were raising but not how many sales they were making.  I try to steer clear of companies like that.  I don’t know really how they are doing now.  It has been almost two years and the NAC hype is hotter than ever.  I’m completely vendor neutral at this point and have found the market too crowded to even venture a guess at which one would be best for my customers.  I know Mike Fratto tries to make sense of it, but I’m still on the sideline.  I discovered Alan’s blog last week, so I think I will have to take a gander at Stillsecure and others and make an opinion.