The NAC shell game

When I was in college, my uncle was able to get me a job one summer working in a building his company managed at 1501 Broadway (Broadway and 43rd St) in NYC.  My younger brother and my cousin also had jobs in the building that summer.  It was a great gig.  I was about 18, making good union wages, no taxes because I was a full-time student, working in Times Square before Disney took it over.  Every week for payday though I would have be drag my brother and cousin back into the building by their ears because they were dead set on losing their money playing the 3-card Monte and shell games that the street hustlers would play right out in the street until the cops chased them away.  I learned a lot of valuable lessons that summer.  One is that those shell games are sucker bets.  I would see the hustlers set it up.  One of their own people would win money making it look easy.  Then some poor rube would think they could win too and that is when the hustle started.  Inevitably the fool and his money were quickly parted.  I had the same feeling today reading Mike Fratto's blog about Alcatel-Lucent partnering with InfoExpress.

It would seem Alcatel-Lucent or ALU as Mike calls them, is playing the shell game with NAC buyers.  Look under any of the shells and you are guaranteed to find a NAC solution.  The problem is which NAC solution.  Today ALU seems to be infatuated with InfoExpress (or at least in lust).  Well just a few months ago the same ALU announced an agreement to OEM ConSentry's NAC product. Before their affair with ConSentry, in fact before the ALU merger, Lucent used to sell the EndForce (now Sophos) NAC product that featured tight integration with Lucent's DHCP server.  So is ALU selling one of these NAC solutions, two of them or all three?  Sounds like a confusing situation to me to say the least.  More importantly my experience with these types of relationships are that the water gets so muddy and the messaging so convoluted, that none of them will be successful.