Partnerships

One of my most treasured memories from college was the time my buddy Alex and I went to a fraternity rush event where they were serving Tom Collins. Lots of Tom Collins. Neither one of us could make it back to the dorm on our own, so we basically leaned on each other, took one ginger step at a time, and made it back in one piece. We were literally two drunks holding each other up and remain very close friends 20 years later. To this day I cannot drink Gin.

I get the same feeling looking at the Symantec/Juniper announcement this morning (here). I can imagine Scott Kriens of Juniper and John Thompson of Symantec meeting at one of those cocktail parties where your personal net worth needs to be in the 9 figure range to get in, and one goes to the other: "Hey, you're not Cisco! We should do something together."

I'm not sure how much wine they each had at that fateful party, but this is clearly two vendors who are not Cisco trying to prop each other up.

On the surface, I'm not as negative as Stiennon on this deal (here), but I think the impact will be largely at the product level and transparent to customers. Juniper gets to build in some of Symantec's "intelligence" into their perimeter network security gear. Symantec gets to reference sell a legitimate perimeter platform.

I do agree with Richard that this is clearly a reactive deal driven by the fact that Cisco has a better story, bigger channels, and more momentum in the security space. Neither could do an outright acquisition, so this is what they are left with. I concur that the channel stuff is going to be hard to navigate, especially for the Juniper folks - that don't really understand the enterprise and don't really understand security either (many of their Netscreen folks have left).

But adding Symantec's anti-spam, IPS signatures, and vulnerability research to Juniper's products will make them better and I think it will actually happen. Why wouldn't Juniper do this, given they are pretty much irrelevant in the IPS space and don't really have a compelling UTM platform? They've got nothing to lose.

And Symantec gets access to a legitimate perimeter security platform. After killing their own platform a few months back, this is the other piece of the puzzle they couldn't answer back then. Clearly they couldn't abandon the market, but they also didn't want to continue investing in a non-competitive platform. This solves those problems IF (and that is a huge IF) they can execute, which certainly hasn't been Symantec's forte of late.

So I would be positive on this deal if it involved money changing hands. Or an asset transfer (like SYMC bought the Netscreen business). Or anything besides a press release in a purple suit. But it doesn't, so I'm negative and skeptical.

But clearly both Kriens and Thompson now can proudly display their ABC (anyone but Cisco) membership cards. That's what this is all about.

So I went on a bit of a tirade last week regarding phishing, making the point that carriers have a significant responsibility to provide some level of anti-spam/anti-phishing on their pipes. I'm glad to say I am not alone in that assessment and a carrier is finally willing to step up and offer some help, at least to small business.

Let me also clarify that I'm referring to business customers, as opposed to consumers. Both AOL and Earthlink (and I'm sure a bunch of others) offer security services to their consumer subscribers, and it's the right thing to do. But most carriers sock it to small business (I know because Security Incite is an SMB), and usually it's more cost effective (and secure) to buy the "consumer" version of many services.

Today the "new" AT&T (kind of makes me laugh from my telecom days) has announced a relationship with McAfee to provide MFE's anti-spam capabilities, free of charge, with a premium AT&T service called Unified Communications Service. This is a good thing for customers and for AT&T, who is now able to differentiate this service with value added security.

McAfee has an initiative called "Clean Pipes" to help service providers "build and deliver managed security services for their customers..." (their words, not mine). McAfee has been making inroads on the consumer side via ISP bundling (based on a survey done by my friend Walter Pritchard over at SG Cowen), and now they are extending this to small business. Again, it's the right thing to do, especially given the imminent entrance of Microsoft into the consumer and SMB AV space.

So, bandwidth is a commodity. In most cases, messaging services are a commodity. Users should hold out and take their money to the service providers that understand the importance of security as a core component of both bandwidth and messaging services.