Lockdown Ceases Operations
As frequent readers of this blog will no doubt expect, I was completely unsurprised by the shutdown of Lockdown Networks last week. Following the fire-sale of Caymas Systems and the announced restructuring of Vernier Networks as Autonomic Networks, it is natural that more NAC vendors would fall. Coincidentally, I was on the phone with a customer looking to swap out their Lockdown products for something more robust just before I heard the news.
For some analysis, take a look at the blog posts from Jon Oltsik and Eric Ogren, two former-colleagues of one another in the analyst community. The two take very different views with Jon pointing to Lockdown’s retooling of their product as a reason for their failure (but maintaining that the NAC market is healthy) while Eric blames the NAC market in general and the difficulty competing with Cisco and Microsoft.
I think Jon has things more on the money. The classic device-centric NAC market is crowded and with so many players it is awfully hard to reinvent yourself and still stay competitive. Part of me is surprised it has taken so long for another vendor to fail. After all, Cisco announced its intent to purchase Perfigo back in October of 2004. Perfigo’s product became Cisco Clean Access (the giant of the fledgling device NAC market). Lockdown’s technology seems almost identical to Perfigo’s but the market has moved on since then.
When I talk to customers I continue to hear the same themes as I did back in 2005 when I joined Identity Engines:
- Organizations want to use the network enforcement gear they already have
- No one wants to deploy a new inline device in their existing network (support and cost issues are cited)
- User identity is far more important than device health because it allows for far more fine-grained access decisions
- Guests and contractors is the area of greatest security concern
- Proprietary clients are a no-no
802.1X is the natural antidote to these desires and now that the deployments are getting larger and the technical objections are being removed through better solutions, I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about 802.1X this year. In fact, tying back to the Lockdown news you can see evidence of this in the market as a whole. Lockdown’s non-Cisco competitors are now talking a lot more about 802.1X and trying to bolt-on more of this type of functionality into their existing non-802.1X offerings. For a sense of this trend, look at the acquisitions in this space since Perfigo. We have Juniper acquiring Funk Software in November of 2005 and Cisco acquiring Meetinghouse Data Communications in July of 2006. The main technology asset of both companies was, you guessed it, 802.1X capabilities.