Groundswell

Mr Hirst and Ms Simey have ordered my own copy of Groundswell, so I've got another read on the go...it looks good, so i'm going home for a read.

I'm doing some long-term strategic work on SAAS Web Security. I've noticed a few new kids in town to compete with Scansafe. This has got to be good for this market. Its going to force the price down and the service up. The market hasn't really changed since Scansafe came along in 1999. Kaspersky and Secure Computing have new services available now, also have a look at http://www.zscaler.com/ http://www.purewire.com/

Email DR Service

Just thought I'd remind you about a service we started to offer after Christmas. Its a very simple bolt-on to Postini which enables you to have access to your email in the event of a DR situation. Let me explain how it works...

In the event that your 'mail server' is off the air because its failed, your Internet connectivity has failed, or your building is now a pile of rubble, then Postini 'spools' your email in the cloud. That is something Postini has done since Day 1.

But, what if you want to get 'at' your email in between your DR plan kicking in, and your mail server being available again ? Easy, we now have another cloud based service that we use for customers to temporarily use for access to their email. What we do is release the email from postini and send it to our 'holding' service. You can then access it, read it, forward the email reply to email etc, just by using a web browser, like any other webmail. Only downside is, that you need a seperate email password to your regular LAN password, but thats no big deal.

Its very cheap, and like I say is designed to be a stop-gap - between invoking full DR and your mail server going down.

AV Companies Compromised This Week

This bit of news caught my eye this week. I can't help but feel this is all very avoidable, especially for a security vendor. Web Application Firewalls which sanity check web input value and data have been around for years now to prevent SQL injection attacks. We've sold them since 2005 ! Cheaper than a code review any day of the week...and a bit quicker to implement...imagine all of those scared techies at 'not so F-Secure' and Kaspersky running around. Maybe this is just the start of a trend along the lines of 'laptops and memory sticks' on trains...and then follow up emails from disk/media encryption vendors saying 'told you so' :-(

Email Message Security Gartner

We've recently been working closely with Paul Barker and Amanda Holt at Exclusive Networks, and they introduced me to Proofpoint. This is a Google competitor and well regarded by Gartner. Its not as cheap as Postini, and doesn't support Lotus Domino Archiving, but its still very good. Its interesting to see Mimecast don't even appear on the quadrant. There's quite a few vendors in this space now and we represent a few of them, Postini, Symantec, Proofpoint, Cisco, Clearswift, Secure Computing, Sophos, Websense and Marshal. Its interesting how most of them now have a 'cloud' based solution of some kind. The software and appliance solutions really aren't the first choice anymore that they were 5-7 years ago.

New Offices ?

It looks like we are going to move offices this year. Growth of Network Integration coupled with wanting some space that is even smarter than we are already lucky enough to have ! means we are looking at buying or moving out of our current home. Anita is on the case and has got a good shortlist. This should happen around May this year.

Thought for the day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_diem

Messagelabs - Disturbing Contract Pattern Emerging ?

Over the last few weeks and months we've been talking to Messagelabs cutomers about moving over to Postini/Google. This is nothing new. All customers are looking to save money at the moment regardless of their size. What is interesting though, is that we have seen now instances of four different customers, (all different sizes) who have bought both direct from Messagelabs (ML) and partners. When customers have tried to give notice to ML, they have found this difficult, (impossible) to leave them. ML have a very tight contract in place which stipulates 90 days notice..which is fine...except if you miss their window of 'notice', and don't put it in writing, to th right person/department on the right dates, then you find yourself automatically renewed for another year and there's nothing the customer can do about it. Just continue to wait another year. Now I wouldn't mind if this was out in the open, but how many ML customers ever read the contract they signed, or can even find it now ! Postini has massively undercut this market in the last 2 years, and Google buying them only seeks to re-inforce their credibility as the biggest player in the world...heck even Symantec had to buy number 2 vendor for a change ! Just look at the effect Google Apps has had on Microsoft ! Customers know they have a choice and the market is competitive. We know that any of the Postini competitors can't get even close on features and price. Mimecast, Websense, ML, none of them get close on price to Postini. Oh, and Postini have a nice and simple 14 day notice period once you have been with them for a year. Why can't Messagelabs do this ? What are they frightened of ? Maybe Symantec will bring some sense to this worrying situation before their investment in ML is eroded by Postini ?

Do small companies take security seriously ? Apparently not.

I heard from Jonathan this morning that one of the tenants in his building in the centre of Leeds, West One, StickyEyes had been broken into last night. Our Sales Manager saw this as a good opportunity to maybe assist, and when he called them, their director Stephen Lee said "Security is of no interest to me", why said Oliver ? "It just isn't" he said and promptly put the phone down. Oh well, maybe StickyEyes customers and partners also aren't interested in security as well.

Cloud Computing

I've been writing a proposal for a new customer specifically looking at how Cloud Computing can help improve their business efficiency and help (not hinder) their long term growth. Its actually an interesting exercise, as I hadn't realised how far we've come as an industry since the early days of Postini and Eroom in 1999, to today where so many of the services we sell (well nearly all of them !) have cloud elements or alternatives to tin and software on customer premises. Its been actually interesting to see how our portfolio has tracked these changes in the last 3 years to keep ahead of this change in the market. I might add that we are now able to sell Google Apps, as well as Postini, which is our course where we've seen a lot of interest this year.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Firewalls November 2008

We' ve been looking at the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant in the office this last few days as we have a few customers looking at new firewalls. We've been selling the three market leaders for some time now, Checkpoint, Cisco and Juniper. We don't consider the others left in the market as being very serious offerings and view them as second division vendors and products, (this would include the Fortinet, and Astaro and Sonicwall) in fact I wouldn't use any of those on my own broadband at home ! They might be cheap, but they aren't particularly cheerful ! Why an enterprise customer would want to risk cutting corners with them is beyond me really. As my Dad used to say, "use the right tool for the job, and don't buy cheap tools". The sad part about it is a lot of customers are simply buying on price at the moment, and aren't looking into the bigger picture of this kind of purchase, e.g long term support, quality of support, ease of use, integration with the rest of their estate, are they 'best of breed ?'. Enterprise Network Firewalls aren't quite a commodity yet, but the buying of them shouldn't be treated in the same way you buy a laptop and PC....on price.

I'm currently looking for one technical pre and post sales resource and one sales person. If you live in the Yorkshire area and are currently looking for a new challenge then please get in touch with me. You will need commercial and technical experience of the types of services and products we offer. See http://www.networkintegration.co.uk for more info on what we do.

See my profile on Linkedin.com

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=2495900&trk=tab_pro

There you go, I've set it up Jonathan !

Jonathan Hirst recommended I started a blog at the last partners meeting.