The Ashimmy Blog

Is Cisco leaving MARS for dead?

I was a bit shocked to read several articles last week about Cisco’s apparent decision to stop adding new third party device support into Cisco MARS SEIM product. When I first read Ellen Messmer’s Network World story I thought perhaps Jerry Skurla over at Nitro was blowing smoke trying to stir up some FUD around the future of the Cisco product.  But it looks like other SIEM vendors have been hearing the same things. On top of that Cisco’s own spokesman came out with less then a ringing endorsement of MARS future. 

Usually in cases like this, where there is smoke there is fire.  Sounds like we could see MARS become a casualty of Cisco having too wide a focus. Between set top boxes, video conferencing, servers and virtualization, something has to give.  Could be some of the security stuff is what it is. It would be a shame though. I thought MARS was one of the better pieces of the Cisco security line up. It made their IPS so much more useable. 

The wide, wacky world of Ethernet switching

I have written before that to many the Ethernet switching market is a fairy tale of Cisco and the seven dwarfs, except that these dwarfs really aren’t so little. Companies like HP, Brocade, Nortel, 3Com, Enterasys, Juniper, Force 10 are constantly biting at the heels of the Cisco monolith.

Recently, some of these have actually made solid progress. HP’s ProCurve network gear division claims to be solidly in the 2nd place slot and closing.  Foundry’s merger with Brocade created a viable competitor to Cisco across storage and Ethernet switching. 3Com has actually shown some signs of life recently in the international market.

Today though three articles caught my attention that show that it is still a wide and wacky world in the switch business. First comes word that Ciena is offering $521m for the assets of bankrupt Nortel. Hard to believe that once might Nortel has fallen so far. Next Extreme Networks, which has always had the rep of having great technology was hammered by the markets yesterday after releasing guidance that they will badly miss this quarter. They blamed the shortfall on supply chain problems.  Listening to that you would think they had all of these orders they were unable to fulfill that as a result were pushed our or cancelled.  Maybe that is true, but it just doesn’t seem so to me. I think there might be other issues at play there. Finally, the latest rumors are that Brocade is now shopping themselves and likely buyers are HP or Oracle. A sale to HP would certainly make for a powerhouse. I am not sure what Oracle would do in this market though.  Here is my prediction; look for IBM to get into this market soon.

One thing for sure though is that the constant jockeying for position to take on the still undefeated Cisco will continue.

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• Who Will Buy Brocade? (gigaom.com)
• Is Brocade selling itself? (theregister.co.uk)
• Report: Brocade for Sale, Suitors Include HP (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Nortel to sell ethernet business to Ciena (financialpost.com)

McAfee wants you to fight over 3 percent margins too

If you are a Cisco VAR or reseller what kind of margins do you make on Cisco sales?  Most of the Cisco resellers I speak to have to try and cut their neighbors throats as they fight over Cisco business that while plentiful is often such low margin that the bottom line takes a hit.  Well good news for all you McAfee resellers out there. The same system is coming to you soon!

According to this article in eChannels the new McAfee channel chief who came over from Cisco wants to emulate the Cisco model. What does that mean for you?  Well everyone and their Mom will be a McAfee reseller and the bidding on McAfee products will force you to lower prices to the point that you are working for peanuts. Also if you offer a competing product they are liable to tell you that you will never see another McAfee deal again.  I have heard that from lots of Cisco VARs too. Sound appealing?  Except of course McAfee ain’t no Cisco, they don’t control 70% of their market.  There will be other resellers pushing Symantec, StillSecure and other security products and making bigger margins.  Just something to think about.

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Is the sun going down on the Cisco empire?

For a long time it was very fashionable to dump on and talk trash about the two pre-eminent tech monoliths, Microsoft and Intel. AMD was making competitive products and stealing market share from the mighty Intel.  Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates and everyone was counting the days, weeks and months until Windows was no longer the dominant computing platform (not to mention Office). But you hardly heard a peep about any chinks in the armor of the 3 great tech oligarchy, Cisco.  Cisco’s stranglehold was unassailable. Yeah Juniper has good routers and security and even rolled out a switch line, but come on now. Juniper and the rest of the competition are the seven dwarfs compared to Cisco.  But now like the Roman Empire Cisco maybe vulnerable and like the Roman empire it is a result a rot from the inside and pressures from the outside.

From the inside there has been much written about a “life changing” conference John Chambers attended that led him to restructure Cisco’s management from a traditional top down model to a management by committee model. Everything is now decided by a series of committees. Just as Democracy may be much more inefficient then dictatorship type of governing, management by committee is equally as inefficient. This has caused Cisco to become even slower to respond and more lumbering than a company there size would be normally. This has caused many including Henry Blodgett to question whether John Chambers has lost his mind.

In the meantime the competition has gotten better.  HP has finally awakened to the fact that they have a switching division within the company. They have put the corporate wood behind ProCurve. They have the resources to take Cisco on and are doing it every day as Brad Reese from the Cisco subnet on Network World points out. IBM also seems to have moved from the partner to the competitor column. These are not small companies. It seems they are really putting a dent on Cisco, while Juniper and even Extreme Networks and 3Com continue to move. Even a revitalized, private Enterasys is gaining momentum.  In the meantime Cisco announced an earnings decrease of almost 50%. Om Malik asks if competitors are eating into Cisco’s core switching business.

It does truly seem like a perfect storm for Cisco. How they whether it and who the ultimate winners are here is of major importance to just about everyone in the IT space!

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• Are Competitors Eating Into Cisco's Core? (gigaom.com)
• Cisco's upside potential (money.cnn.com)
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• IBM combats Cisco's computing move with a switch partnership of its own (insidehpc.com)
• IBM Fires Juniper Salvo at Cisco (gigaom.com)

Citrix leads $10m investment in Vyatta. Why?

Saw this story today about Citrix leading a $10 million dollar round of investment in Vyatta.  This is on top of the $18m they had raised previously.  While I think an open source router that runs on x86 platform and can be virtualized and run along side security apps is a great idea (Can you say Cobia?), I am not sure what would drive Citrix to this.  Are they so incensed about the Cisco/VMware relationship that they think that Vyatta is actually an option? Why not go strike a deal with Juniper and save the money?  Maybe because Xen has its roots in open source, so Vyatta is a nice compliment?

On the other hand, getting a company to make a strategic investment in this climate is not an easy thing, so good for Vyatta. Could this be the opening move in Citrix buying Vyatta and building in routing to the Xen virtual environment and some of their Netscaler stuff?  Time will tell.

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In search of Unicorns

Here at Interop the show floor was pretty dead yesterday.  I had a chance to sit in the audience on a panel on NAC hosted by Mike Fratto.  Mike had 5 panelists including a few friends of mine. It was pretty much the usual NAC panel.  Steve Hanna from Juniper/TNC touting the standards that his group offers, Cisco saying they will support standards, HP ProCurve always loves standards, Microsoft actually being very pragmatic and then there was JJ.  My friend Jennifer Jabbusch was her usual self talking as she sees it and giving quote fodder to the journalists like Michael Sean Kerner who wrote about the panel in this article.

Of course the media loves to jump on any angle as to why NAC has not brought world peace and helped cure cancer.  So Kerner’s article screams that authentication is where we screwed up.  He says the audience demanded to know when NAC is going to deliver on the promise. How can we have a standard without Cisco. Well I was in the audience too and had all I could to bite my tongue and not say anything.  But hey that is why I have a blog. So let me respond here:

1. Authentication is where we screwed up.  Who said NAC was about authentication?  Listening yesterday you would think that 802.1x authentication was a direct result of NAC needing a secure authentication process.  Guys lets not put the cart in front of the horse.  802.1x offers a lot of other features and advantages besides NAC authentication. In fact it is the other way around.  NAC vendors adopted 802.1x because it offered some distinct advantages.  It was widespread in wireless networks.  However, JJ is right.  It is complex. There are a lot of moving parts. If you have not done everything right to implement 802.1x on your network, don’t bother trying  to use it for NAC.  But if you had, it does work like a charm. As I have said  before it is not for the faint of heart.

But back to my original comment.  Originally NAC/NAP was not the authentication.  NAC rode on top of your existing authentication. We as an industry have issues around easy to use, robust authentication methods.  So this became NAC’s problem?  A good NAC solution should be able to use the authentication system you are using.  Authentication sucks?  Look to the folks developing authentication.  Hint: it is the same network vendors sitting on the panel.  But lets not saddle NAC with albatross.

2. Searching for the mythical NAC Unicorn. Fact is there was one member in the audience who was quite vocal (no not me) and kept insisting that NAC would not be real until everyone adopted one standard, that no matter what network we log into, no matter what different software I had, NAC would solve it all because “a big database” would contain all of this information. Yeah, all right.  I wanted to ask the guy if he still leave out cookies and milk for Santa Claus.  From what I understand this particular individual makes a habit of doing this at NAC panels.

The guy from Microsoft said it best. It is OK if NAC does not give you all of this, it is still valuable.  Stop trying to make it all things to everyone and take it for what it is. It is not the answer to authentication, it is near impossible to treat heterogeneous network environments like they were homogenous, but that is  not what it is about.  Stop looking for Unicorns and make use of what you have to work with!

Would taxing tech companies foreign income kill the goose that laid the golden egg or just close an unfair loophole?

No sooner had President Obama announced plans to close down some loopholes that allow US based companies to defer and in some cases not pay taxes on income earned out of country, a group calling themselves the Silicon Valley Leadership Group voiced their objections. They claim that many of the largest tech companies like HP, Google, Microsoft and Cisco earn half or more of their money from foreign markets.  They pay the usually lower taxes in those countries and as long as they don’t take that money back in the US, they should not have to pay the higher US tax rate on it.  The group further argues that if these poor tech companies had to pay that tax, it would make them uncompetitive and wind up costing jobs. 

I think they talk out of both sides of their mouth.  I think the present system of letting them avoid taxes by not bringing dollars into the country incents them to keep their money and their employees and spending out of the country!  These countries often get their start by building a US presence. Yes they need to compete internationally but it is high time that we close the loopholes that allow these companies with billions in profit from paying their fair share.  As it is now if a company pays foreign income tax, they can take that as a deduction even though they do not take that income or revenue into the US and pay taxes on it.  Additionally they can deduct from their US taxes money they use to build foreign operations, while again not paying taxes on the money they earn from those operations.

Everyone wants our economy to do better and have more jobs here.  That means we need to put the incentives in place for these companies to hire Americans in America. It is very hard to feel sorry for these tech companies crying with two loaves of bread under their arms.

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3 way battle royal for the data center

I was reading the news yesterday about IBM oem’ing Foundry/Brocade switches. Watching the machinations of companies vying for dominance in this space is like watching continental drift over geologic time periods. It seems the same old masses are in constant motion - combining, breaking up and recombining in infinite configurations. Cisco dominated the data center network infrastructure. HP had servers and storage. IBM competed with HP but dominated in services.  HP buys EDS competes with IBM in services. Cisco makes blade servers, competes with HP. HP heavily promotes its ProCurve line to compete with Cisco.  IBM oem’s Foundry/Brocade, competes with HP and Cisco.  Round and round she goes, where it stops nobody knows. Hey what is Microsoft going to do? As much as it goes around, it seems at the end of the day it is the same old big giants that dominate and are constantly trying to steal each others cheese.

I do know that there are billions of dollars at stake.  With stakes that high, it will be a fight to the finish.  However, sooner or later equilibrium will set in. Every side will find its niche. I don’t think any of these guys are going out of business or anything. In the meantime it could create opportunity too for smaller vendors to run between the legs of these giants and deliver solutions that customers need.  By the same token I am sure that this new jostling will lead to a new round of acquisitions as well.  Same old same old in the tech business!  The faces change, but the names stay the same!

What's so funny about working in the channel?

Today’s lesson comes courtesy of my friend JJ.  For those who don’t know JJ was born and raised around her parents integrator business down in North Carolina. Yesterday JJ sent out this very funny video she found based on the “what do I want to be when I grow up” theme.  There is some mildly offensive language that I doubt any of you will mind.  While watching though remember that for most of us, vendor or user – the integrator, VAR, channel  partner is the key distribution and delivery vehicle that is responsible for much of our security and IT in general. 

I have some other good articles below, so be sure to continue on after the video. Have a good day!

Browser Wars continued? – Couple of articles today about browser security wars.  And here I thought the browser wars ended when Marc Andreessen left Netscape! First Brian Krebs has a good article about a report from Secunia. The report details two metrics. One is how many security flaws were reported and fixed over the past year. The second and as Brian points out much more important metric, was how long on average it took to fix.  On the first metric, believe it or not Mozzila far outpaced other browsers in the number of vulnerabilities fixed with over 100. This was like 4 times more then IE for example.  But again as Brian says, the key thing was that Mozzilla fixed their holes on average in 43 days versus over 100 days for the Redmond team.  Me, I think these are both too much. Of course I want to see less vulnerabilities found, but that is a pipe dream.  Quicker response times is the key and I would like to see them both under 30 days!

Browser Wars continued part 2- A new version of the Opera browser was released to address some security flaws. Who cares?  Between IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, all being free, is their any room for another browser? If there is how does Opera make enough money to keep the lights on against these competitors that give it away?

Cisco discovers SaaS for email security – where is the innovation? – The Cisco marketing machine was out in all of its super heavyweight force this week with the announcement that its IronPort email security division was rolling a hybrid SaaS model.  Even I got spammed by the PR folks.  While I think it noteworthy that even Cisco is joining the SaaS/Managed security market, I have to agree with Eric Ogren (who I rarely agree with), what is so unique about this offering? Is there anything that Google/Postini doesn’t offer? For that matter is there anything that Symantec or Websense or any number of other vendors don’t offer.  Don’t look like it.  I also had a thought about all of those Cisco powered MSPs out there.  How do they feel about Cisco going into direct competition with them? Its bad enough that most Cisco partners would cut each others throats for an extra 2 or 3 points, how do they compete with Cisco itself in offering managed email security?

A new Mogull? A very big shout out to Rich and his wife and new daughter.  Congratulations! Anyway that is it today.  Its almost 7am and I have a full day of meetings before flying home Fll.  Have a great day!

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They fired the Juniper cartoon guy

Now you know things really are tight.  Saw this report today that Juniper has not renewed the contract of Kevin Pope, the guy who makes those edgy cartoons that usually make fun of Cisco.  He has been doing it for 5 years now. Somewhere I have a couple of decks of playing cards with each one another cartoon.  Two of my favorite ones are here:

If you want to see more click here. In many ways this is the end of an era. I wonder what Juniper will do next and wonder what cartoons Pope will work on next.