Its people like Amrit that make blogging fun

You know after my UTM panel at RSA I was talking to Ross Brown about what I said to someone and he said something like "big deal it was like kicking a mentally challenged guy"  Of course he used another word instead of mentally challenged, but hey I am PC these days.  What Ross said was right on.  There is no fun if there is no competition.  Sort of like gambling when you know you are going to win all the time.  It is not really gambling, if you know you are going to win and it quickly grows boring.  That is why I like to blog.  Verbally sparring with the likes of Mike Rothman, Ross Brown, Chris Hoff (when every so often he remembers to blog) and of course Amrit Williams, keeps me on my toes.  These guys give it as good as they get and never shy away from a good argument. It is entertaining, stimulating and usually educational all at once. 

A case in point is my exchange with Amrit today.  He started it by knocking NAC. I came back saying there was nothing the matter with NAC.  Amrit did an artful job of twisting my words and adding his own innuendo to make it like I agreed with him.  I tried without personally attacking him to point out the fallacy and inaccuracies of his characterization.  Amrit came firing back with a put up or shut up comment:

I feel fine, thanks for asking Mitchell. The reality is that Shimel has little leverage but to try to use misdirection, how about you offer up a case study or a company that is willing to discuss this value that NAC provides them?

The reality is NAC is NOT really usable today, especially as advertised, unless you seriously constrain the scope - can NAC products provide remediation of quarantined devices or does this require technical and process integration, is the value just for guest access and unmanaged nodes? Well then there are far less expensive ways to
deal with that problem and honestly if you have users walking into your office able to just plug a laptop in and gain a DHCP address than you have issues far greater than anything Still secure can offer. What about all the mobile devices, like blackberry's PDA's, USB dongles - NAC helping you out there? What about the protection of data - is NAC the answer for that?

So posture all you want big man the proof is in the revenue :-)

So, what am I to do?  Should I give in to my baser instincts and engage Amrit on this?  You have to admire his in your face attitude.  Sort of a real little bulldog.  Well Amrit, here is my response.  I would be happy to share revenue and customer reference and case studies with you. However, we only share that with current Gartner analysts, not former ones.  Sorry Charlie ;-)