On Standards and Startups
With the news that inline NAC vendor Caymas Systems has gone under, questions from the customer base are bound to come up about the merits of buying products from startups. Time Greene over at Network World has been following the story and has a quote from just such a concerned customer. Kim Hansen at the City of Sioux Falls said:
I can guarantee you that our next SSL vendor will be based on size and dollars, and not just features and ease of use. I need a company that is going to be around in the long run.
Working at a startup myself it is easy to be alarmed by Hansen’s comment. I even sat on a panel at DIDW with Sanjay Uppal, Caymas’ former CEO. There are a few lessons here for vendors and customers alike looking at the startup space.
- Demand standards - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used IDE’s support of standards to mitigate concerns with deploying technology from our relatively young company. While this certainly can’t completely save you if a startup fails, it does improve the odds that you can salvage some of the work you’ve done if you ever need to find a replacement. Real customer loyalty comes from executing on standards better than anyone else, not from locking folks in to proprietary solutions.
- Be extra diligent with data-plane solutions - Caymas’ product sits inline to the flow of network traffic. By offering advanced firewall capabilities and hardware-accelerated traffic inspection, products like Caymas add new functionality over and above what most customers have in their existing infrastructure. However, this technology often comes at a steep cost in up front dollars and ongoing support and administration. I’ve gotten feedback from a number of customers who are wary of new inline solutions. Part of it is Hansen’s newfound concern, but another part is just the comfort level of putting a brand new vendor, regardless of their reliability, inline within an existing functioning network. The “if it ain’t broke…” adage seems to apply here. Control-plane solutions that leverage functionality on existing infrastructure gives you a natural escape valve; you can always turn the new feature off and be right back where you were.
- It isn’t about the awards - Caymas, whose website was still up at the time of this writing, has a whole bunch of awards from the likes of Forrester, Gartner, and Infoworld. These types of awards are designed to encourage a customer to buy a product, and make them more comfortable with that decision. A better metric for the skeptical IT buyer is customer count and growth path. How many customers have bought the product and deployed it in production? What is the growth tragectory in the customer count since the company first shipped product?
Walking away from startups completely will limit any company’s ability to solve leading-edge problems quickly. While sticking only with established vendors is a choice some companies make, you sacrifice a lot by doing so: not only do you lose the technology advantages of the startup, but also the enhanced responsiveness of a startup to your organization’s specific needs. Startups can play a role in most organization’s networks, they just need a bit more attention to the purchase decision than selecting the offering from your favorite giant vendor.