2 analysts, 3 opinions

One thing about analyst opinions, everybody seems to have one.  Fast on the heels of the Forrest-er gang saying that NAC as we know it will fade and give way to PERM, the guiding lights at Infonetics Research say that 80% of large organizations plan to enforce NAC in the network.  Interestingly 51% also plan to enforce at the client.  So 80% plus 51% equals more than it should, but hey I saw another research report that had something like 10% of respondents currently using Microsoft NAP for their NAC.  Pretty good considering it is not even released yet! To be fair the Forrester team might say that you can have PERM and still enforce NAC like function on the network, but I think the whole damn thing is just getting too convoluted already.

Another fact that Infonetics points out is that there is no real consensus on what NAC really is.  Now there is a mind boggling revelation.  I guess we can tune into Ricky Romero for more on that story at 11.  They actually do have some other good data points and you can download some of the info at their site.

With all of these NAC analyst reports floating around, I am sure all of us NAC vendors will have some new data points to put into our marketing slides.  You can always slice this stuff up any way you need it.