Cisco's view: OneWorld with OneNAC

Tim Greene has a good article up today in Network World about Cisco's new plan to blend their multiple NAC personalities.  I was curious to see this news on several fronts. First of all, it was good to see Cisco put up any news about NAC.  For the past several months they had been eerily silent on NAC and I was beginning to think they might be moving away from pushing NAC at all. Secondly, almost from the very first day they acquired Perfigo, the Cisco NAC team had been talking about the Pefigo Clean Machines/Clean Access/ NAC appliance integrating with the NAC framework.  Fact is for all of this time, they were really two very different technologies that did not even complement each other, let alone work together. So seeing this article I thought finally, they are going to integrate NAC appliance and NAC framework.  Over the years I had heard that they were going to phase out the framework and replace it with the appliance.  Then we heard they were going to make the NAC appliance the policy server for framework (which appears to be part of the new plan). They seem to indicate they will share a common agent at the least. This alone would be a good thing.  It still seems though that OneNAC will be best suited for Cisco only environments.

Here is the cruel Cisco trick in all of this though.  The integration won't be done for another 18 months or so.  Thats right, it is just another move by Cisco to try and freeze the NAC market from moving beyond them by pre-announcing some functionality that won't be available anytime soon. Why did they do this? I think it is obvious.  They have two NAC products, neither one of which is a true best of breed product and in fact is rapidly falling behind the market in NAC in terms of functionality.  The appliance which will work in non-Cisco environments is being replaced or beaten in many places.  The NAC framework can leverage Cisco's huge presence in the network, but no one wants to use it.  So take two mediocre products and combine them and what do you have?  I will leave that answer to you.  However, no matter what you and I think, there will be plenty of people who will wait for Cisco to deliver OneNAC and will buy it when it comes out.  After all, no one gets fired for buying Cisco, right?  Then again, I am not sure anyone gets promoted for buying Cisco either.