Report Card: Incite #1 - No Mas Box

Over the next 3 days I'll be revisiting each of the 2006 Incites, giving myself a grade and putting a close on 2006. This will give all of us the ability to start fresh in 2007. I'll be posting my 2007 Incites on Feb 10, which will start the 2007 Days of Incite - where I'll get out my crystal ball and wax poetic about where things are going over the next 12 months.

Without further ado, the first of the 13 part 2006 Incite Report Card!

Incite #1 - No Mas Box

Users will increasingly revolt about adding yet another narrowly focused security appliance into their network and actively examine new simplification architectures. New Unified Threat Management (UTM) products, using blade servers and virtualization technologies, appear in 2006 putting vendors that license key intellectual property at a disadvantage. Management of the integrated UTM environment will remain difficult through 2007.

Grade: B

Original Days of Incite post: here
Incite Redux post: here

In looking back at this Incite, something very profound occurs to me. The first part of the projection, regarding integration, has happened. Customers are voting with their dollars and continuing to look at integrated solutions to swap out stand-alone technology. That is driving significant growth for UTM vendors, and those that have evolved their technology to serve multiple purposes.

It’s also not as easy to manage these UTM devices, as it needs to be. Customers are still largely looking at solutions that are integrated on the glass. There is value in that from a workflow and administrator experience standpoint, but it does minimize the value that a truly integrated policy could bring.

For example, imagine that you bring on a new trading partner and connect your networks. It would be great to have a wizard that configures the proper VPN connectivity, white lists the partners domain for email, but still scans each packet coming across to prevent the proliferation of malware. Sure you could do that today, and for a skilled administrator – it’s not that big of a deal. But it should be easy for all types of administrators.

Hopefully we’ll see true management integration in 2007.

I know, nothing thus far sounds that profound. But let’s take a look at the middle part of the Incite – detailing UTM architecture. This part is neither right nor wrong. The epiphany is that it really doesn’t matter. Customers don’t care about virtualization; they don’t care about intellectual property licensing. They care about whether the product solves their problems and if they can get it at a fair price. Clearly they want the vendor to stay around, so business viability is important – but gross margins are not.

So you won’t see any more product architecture projections from me because ultimately it’s not important. Not in a rapidly maturing product category anyway.