Report Card: Incite #12 - Battle of the Titans

This is it. The last Report Card. Overall, not bad for my first year back in the game. But not good either. So I'll be working to make my Incites even more "inciteful" next year. Keep on the lookout, as the new batch of Incite will arrive on January 10 and will kick off even more Days of Incite.

Incite #12 - Battle of the Titans

The big will continue to get bigger in 2006, as frenetic consolidation continues as product line breadth outweighs actual functionality. By the end of 2006, it becomes apparent that the real battle is between Cisco and Microsoft to control the architecture of networks and applications moving forward. As with other huge marketectures, users are caught in the crossfire, but 2007 will see enough additional functionality for those embracing homogeneity to see a wave of infrastructure upgrades. Vendors not strongly aligned with one of the two titans face irrelevance by 2009.

Grade: B

Incite Redux post: here

The big continued to get bigger in 2006, boy did they ever! Some of the super big technology players bought big security vendors (EMC/RSA, IBM/ISS) to remake the face of the security market. Even the biggest of the big security vendors (Symantec, McAfee, Check Point) were the subject of acquisition rumors throughout the year.

Just goes to show that “big is the new small” and will remain that way for a long time to come in our space.

But what about this Cisco/Microsoft battle I speak of in the Incite? If anything, the two technology super-powers are looking more for détente than World War III. What fun is that? Between NAC interoperability and lots of other joint initiatives, it seems that Ballmer and Chambers are singing kumbaya around the campfire.

Don’t believe it. Right now these announcements are all about maintaining thought leadership around security infrastructure until both of these vendors can deliver on their promises. Microsoft has much more to lose since they are still 18 months (optimistic case) from delivering on their next generation security architecture, which revolves around Vista and Longhorn.

Cisco is a bit closer, but they’ve still got a lot of work to do to upgrade customer networks, so all of those fancy new security capabilities will be useful. They also need another 12-18 months of upgrades and refreshes to bundle in a MARS box to drive a lot of the security intelligence that drives Cisco’s plan.

And what about everyone else? Well two of the busiest partner programs are Cisco’s and Microsoft’s, so even if it’s just to put the partner seal on their marketing collateral – pretty much every smaller company makes the pilgrimage and writes the checks to be involved in both partner programs. So everyone is aligned with everyone at this point, which means that it’s all a load of crap.

For those vendors that aren’t Cisco or Microsoft, the biggest business over the next two years will be helping customers position their networks with “tactical” technology to solve today’s problems (like visitor access and leak prevention), while providing a migration path to either Cisco’s and/or Microsoft’s architectures in a couple of years. It’s amazing, but once again we will see a lot of tactical products become strategic. Haven’t we seen this movie before?