Jon's Network

Christopher Hoff opines that content monitoring and protection (CMP) is a feature rather than a market justifying it’s own device in the network. Evidence of the fact can be seen as larger vendors swallow up CMP vendors to add to their feature set. He mentions that Websense acquired Port Authority and McAfee acquired Onigma.

Many CMP firms are probably looking to sell to avoid vanishing into oblivion, but selling the company isn’t the only way to survive. If the product is a feature, then market it as a feature. Vendors can do this by publishing an SDK, so their product can be run as a feature on a wide variety of competing platforms and frameworks. (Cobia perhaps?) Vericept is one vendor I know of that will be taking this approach. I’m sure many UTM vendors would like to tout Vericept compatibility as a feature. They will be able to just that in the near future.