I'm a big fan of case studies and references during the procurment process. For end users, understanding how someone else is using the technology to solve a problem that you may have is instructive. That is, when the case study is done right. So when I saw a feature in NetworkWorld that said they were going to highlight 40 end-users and what they are doing with networking and security, I was ready to suit up and get some perspectives from these All-Stars.

The game was called on the basis of mediocrity. You can read it for yourself here [1].

I'm sure these are all wonderful people that are doing good work to protect their environments. But what good is a 50-100 word paragraph within the context of a case study? Not a hell of a lot. Putting myself in a typical NWW reader's shoes, these snippets are not valuable in the least. I see one sentence on what the problem is, one sentence on the vendor that provided a solution, and a quote from the "all-star." How do I use that information to make myself better or to learn something?

I get that NWW has limited space, and they have a lot of PR people hounding them all day (and probably all night) about all the cool references they can provide for vendors, whose technology had made these users into all-start. It feels like NWW took the easy road, as opposed to the useful road. How hard could it be? PR person supplies case study. Reporter maybe calls the reference to confirm. They write a paragraph and move onto the next one.

What I'd like to see is a more detailed treatment of one (or maybe two) environments. Where you get a feel for what they are doing in their entirety, not just one very constrained problem that allows the reporter to mention a product. Network Computing does this and calls it The Centerfold (here [2]). They provide a map of the network and list all of the products in use (or most of them anyway).

The centerfolds are outstanding and useful. The All-Stars are not. Again, it's a shame that NWW couldn't derive much useful information from talking to 40 enterprise customers, who are clearly on the leading edge of deploying security technology.