Gartner on Cisco and Meetinghouse
Gartner released a small report outlining the implications of Cisco’s acquisition of Meetinghouse titled: “Cisco/Meetinghouse Deal Weakens NAC Standardization Efforts.” The report is summarized in a ComputerWeekly article which is the best place to read about it if you don’t have access to Gartner’s research directly. Gartner is anticipating much of the same events I wrote about earlier this month: namely that Cisco will pull Meetinghouse out of the TCG-TNC and there will be no more independent and commercial 802.1X supplicants on the market. To quote the report’s summary:
Acquiring Meetinghouse will round out Cisco’s 802.1x offering. But recognize that deploying a Cisco supplicant will likely require you to commit to a full Cisco Network Admission Control implementation.
It will be interesting to see if the second NEA BoF at the recent IETF meeting is successful in converting to a working group. If not, I’m not sure what this says about NAC standards in the mid-term. You can read the minutes here.