The Ashimmy Blog: ISS 2 years after

Niel Roiter over at Techtarget has a good article up on what has become of ISS as it approaches 2 years under the rule of Big Blue. Of course Mitchell and I had Tom Noonan on just a few weeks ago and as we spoke about, Tom is no longer at IBM/ISS. At the time of the ISS acquistion, speculation was rampant over whether IBM would continue the ISS product line or instead concentrate on the services side of the ISS business, which represented the majority of the revenue actually.

Coinciding with the 2 year anniversary, IBM/ISS actually released a slew of new/updated products:

A new release of its unified threat management (UTM) tailored for small business, including, for the first time, an SSL VPN.
A virtual appliance version of its network intrusion prevention system (IPS).
An update to its network enterprise vulnerability scanner.
An IPS controller, effectively a load-balancer to aggregate IPS appliances to achieve a greater throughput of up to 10 Gbps.
A new release of Proventia Management SiteProtector, IBM's security management console.

So at first blush it seems that ISS/IBM is still very much concentrated on products. It took 2 years to find their way within the IBM universe but are getting back to business. But as Neil points out, a closer look at the new releases show two trends:

1. IBM/ISS is moving down to the SMB/SME market. Clearly making products easier and better suited to a smaller customer was a driving force here.

2. MSSP or SaaS is the holy grail for them. All of these products are being made to work together and be managed by a central outsourced MSSP. IBM, like many others sees the security market for the mid-market moving to a managed model. IBM wants to move down stream from managing not only the largest networks in the world, but managing every network in the world.

Network management is more than just security, but security will play an in important role in it. We are going to see IBM, HP, Verizon, etc. increasingly coming down into the SMB/SME market to offer to manage IT environments for customers. Historically this has always been like herding cats. The question is, what will make it different this time?