To the surprise of no one who read the comments to my earlier post, it is now official that Nortel was the purchaser of Identity Engines’ IP assets. They updated the IDE homepage with a short message and contact info for more information. Given that they are inviting IDE customers to contact Nortel’s account teams, I’m hopeful that they’ll be providing some ongoing support options to existing IDE customers. Have any IDE customers contacted Nortel yet? What was the result?
Archive for January, 2009
Yes, it was Nortel.
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009802.1X Update for Cat 6500
Friday, January 16th, 2009Just a quick 802.1X update that some folks may have missed. There is a new IOS release for the 6500: 12.2.33 SXI (gotta love our naming scheme). It provides some very nice improvements for wired 802.1X rollouts. Network World wrote up the basics and even provides some config examples; take a look. When this hits the other Cisco switch platforms I’ll be sure to provide another update.
60 Days of Cisco
Friday, January 16th, 2009I’ve been back at Cisco for nearly two months and I’ve been doing my best to adapt from the startup culture I was living for a few years to the Cisco culture I was in for seven years. The good news is Cisco seems more agile than when I left; there is more collaboration and I see a lot of good things happening. It is great to meet so many new people and also work with many of my former colleagues. So while the first all-day meeting was certainly a shock, I’m not feeling disoriented.
As I mentioned, I’m not working strictly in Identity but will certainly be involved given my background. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about some of the meta-trends in IT such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, virtualization, and the like. The impact on–and the value that can be derived from–the network regarding these trends is a very interesting space.
I did get a chance to get a dump from the ACS folks on their shipping 5.0 product. It looks and feels like a complete rewrite of ACS because it is. The UI is cleaner, the configuration steps more obvious, and the policy sophistication is far beyond ACS 4.X. There is plenty of work still to do but the gap between what we had at IDE and what ACS can do now is far more narrow. ACS also now does things that we didn’t do at IDE.
I am interested in talking to customers about their plans around SaaS, cloud, and virtualization (particularly desktop). If you are responsible for IT at your organization and can spare some time to talk with me live, I’d love to chat. My new email is my first name at cisco dot com.