We’re excited to welcome our Asia Pacific and Central & Latin America sales teams to Napera. John Kirch, Mark Stevens and Heather Johnson joined us at Napera HQ in Seattle this week as we planned the roll out of Napera products to these international markets. John is heading up sales in Japan and South Korea. From Australia, Mark is covering the rest of Asia Pacific, while Heather is responsible for Central and Latin America. Each of them will be working closely with Napera partners in their local markets. In a small twist of fate, it was Mark who introduced me to the WatchGuard products in 1997 and is indirectly responsible for me moving to the US to work with WatchGuard in 1998.

Napera APAC and CALA join Pierre and Austin in our existing EMEA sales group to complete our international sales force, reporting to Cary Kosher, VP of Worldwide Sales. All of our team members were key players of the international team at WatchGuard, and have many years of experience in the network security market around the world. Please email sales @ napera.com if you’d like to arrange a meeting with them.

Heather, Mark, John and Cary enjoying some rare Seattle sun.

Some very interesting news for the NAC market this week with multiple analysts publishing predictions and market forecasts.

Patrik Bihammar at IDC talked up the threat landscape and says NAC has become a high priority because of the “everything, everywhere” network. IDC expects the NAC market to grow at 43 percent year on year to reach $US3.8 billion by 2011.

Infonetics also released its latest market forecast, appropriately titled, “Reports of NAC’s death have been greatly exaggerated”, showing market growth of 16% in 1Q08 and expected double digit growth for the next five years.

All of this good news was tempered by a warning to smaller NAC vendors in a Network World article this morning. In short, Gartner claims Cisco and Microsoft may marginalize NAC vendors by 2009 because of Cisco’s success in the enterprise switching market (and presumably Microsoft’s domination of desktops).

It’s great to see data from IDC and Infonetics, but I’ve heard the Gartner analysis before. In the late nineties it was enterprise vendors like Cisco and Check Point that were going to crush firewall appliance startups. In reality it took Cisco ten years to get their act together, and meanwhile companies like WatchGuard, Sonicwall and Netscreen grew and prospered in the mid and large enterprise markets. If that is the definition of getting crushed by Cisco, bring it on!

The Gartner hypothesis referenced in Network World doesn’t apply equally to all companies. The problems that large enterprises are solving with NAC technology are equally relevant to the small and medium enterprise customer: guest Internet and printer access, endpoint and identity enforcement, and overall visibility into the security state of computers on the network. But the SME market is very different from large enterprise. Cisco has been less than successful selling into the SME, and much of the Linksys SME product line is not interoperable with Cisco’s enterprise architecture. While SMEs have Microsoft NAP on their computers, few will build out an entire NAC/NAP infrastructure based on Cisco products.

Bihammar at IDC named cost and complexity as the prime barriers to NAC adoption, which gets to the heart of the issue. I’ve posted on this exact issue before. The vast majority of Napera customers haven’t heard of NAC, haven’t participated in these debates, and primarily care about the practical application of technology and risks in their company to solve a business problem and not the technology itself. They want a solution that helps them take back control of the computers accessing their network and that does so easily and affordably. That’s where the real opportunity is - how do you help that customers solve those problems without complex, expensive large enterprise products? And that’s what Napera is all about.

Fresh from TechEd, Chris Boscolo spoke on TechNet Radio with Kevin Remde and Jeff Sigman from Microsoft about Network Access Protection. Chris talks about the Napera product line, how we enable NAP for small and medium enterprises and how you can deploy NAP in 10 minutes.

Napera’s CTO Chris Boscolo is attending a panel discussion on Network Acccess Protection at Microsoft’s annual TechEd conference for IT professionals in Orlando today. Join Chris and experts from Microsoft and other NAP partners to see product demonstrations and talk NAP at 1:15pm today Tuesday, June 10^th in room N310 E.

Session code: SVR369

Session: Network Access Protection Overview

Session Day/Time: 6/10/2008 1:15PM-2:30PM

The session repeats on Friday 6/13/2008 at 10:15am if you can’t make it today.

Chris just sent me a great new article at Tech Target from Lisa Phifer on the topic of Securing the New Network. Lisa gives an excellent summary of the state of the art in a couple of intersecting areas such UTM’s, VPN’s and NAC and a couple of relevant quotes caught my eye.

When IDC surveyed enterprises about pressing security challenges for 2007, growing attack sophistication, lack of employee adherence to security policy, and increasing complexity of security solutions and network traffic were top concerns…

This is a close match to the sort of feedback we’ve received from customers since we founded Napera. The increased financial motivation behind attacks, the need to check the health and identity of devices at the edge of the network and the growing complexity of products are familiar refrains.

Lisa puts forward a couple of market outcomes for the differing approaches to Network Access Control as well.

Many analysts believe that NAC will become an accepted best practice. Others find NAC architectures overly complex and believe that NAC appliances suffice. Still others argue that endpoint software, rather than the network, should enforce access decisions. Only time will tell which approach will prevail. All seem to agree, however, that network access must be more tightly controlled, reflecting identity and endpoint state.

I’m not sure if it’s an either/or for the different approaches. Personally I believe the endpoint software based solution looks to be the least feasible in many of our customer networks. Customers already have endpoint software widely deployed, and it’s their lack of ability to enforce endpoint compliance which causes them to seek network level solutions in the first place. A solution that operates at the network level is the best place to enforce policy as well as deliver a great user experience. Whether customers will choose to deploy that solution as part of a large vendor architecture, as a specific NAC appliance or some combination of both remains to be seen.

My blog reader had an unexpected surprise for me this morning - a brand new Javascript based trojan that appears to have been automatically downloaded to my PC via the RSS feed of a blog I subscribe to. According to the virus encyclopedia entry, this trojan was discovered just two days ago. Last week I was on the road for a couple of days and it’s possible my blog reader would have downloaded this before my antivirus updated with the latest signatures, in which case my computer could well have been compromised.

We’ve been running our entire office on a Napera N24 since last year, so the trojan had little opportunity to slip past the up to date antivirus and antispyware software enforced on every computer on our network. Still, it was nice to see a live demonstration of the short time between discovery and proliferation of a threat, and the need to continuously monitor computer health via NAP. Yesterday I was talking to a customer about exactly this type of scenario and how we designed the Napera products to manage it. I didn’t have an inkling that I would be living proof within 24 hours!

Andrew Conry-Murray at InformationWeek stopped by at Interop for a video interview to talk about Napera products and NAC in the SME.

Calvin Choe from the Microsoft NAP team also came by to chat about NAP.

We wrapped up at Interop last night. This was another great show for Napera, and thanks to everyone who stopped by. It was good to catch up with the folks we didn’t see at RSA! I’ll post links later to a couple of video interviews we did at the show.

With RSA edging closer to Interop this year, heading to Las Vegas for Interop seemed like a repeat of what we did just a few weeks ago in San Francisco. On a personal note, I like the idea of RSA moving away from their traditional Valentines Day timing, but scheduling these two shows only weeks apart makes me wonder if RSA is trying to elbow Interop out of the picture just as Interop is making a comeback. That would be a great shame, because Interop is a unique tradeshow. The mix of attendees is very different to RSA and the Interop Labs has always been a valuable industry event that cuts through a lot of the marketing hype and gets down to packets and protocols.

This year the staging for relevant portions of Interop Labs was scheduled during the RSA conference itself, making it tough for smaller companies like Napera to attend both. Essentially it came down to the choice of key engineers meeting with customers at RSA or meeting other engineers at Interop Labs, and the customers always win out. Next year I’m sure the stars will align and we look forward to participating in both.

Yours truly spreading the word about Napera in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion

It may not be the halcyon days of the late 90’s when Interop took over the massive Las Vegas Convention Center, but judging from the mood at today’s show the buzz is definitely back at Interop!

NAC is everywhere, and Mike Fratto’s sneak peek of the Information Week Third Annual NAC survey confirms what you can tell by just walking around the show floor - there is a huge amount of interest from customers in NAC solutions, and we’ve had lots of interesting meetings today.

Speaking of Information Week, Andrew Conroy-Murray just published a great profile on Napera, and I recorded a brief video interview with Andrew for TechWeb that should be published shortly. Hopefully you’ll be able to hear us over the Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand impersonators crooning in the next booth!

I’m speaking Wednesday at 1pm in the Microsoft booth (1719, right near the main exhibit floor entrance). I can’t croon like Ole Blue Eyes, but stop by and say hello if you have a moment.

Todd, Robin and Cary in a rare serious moment.

Napera was proud to be a sponsor of the 1st Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition held this weekend at the Microsoft campus. For ChrisB and I, it was a rare opportunity to see students in action in a highly technical scenario, and we were both impressed by the levels of skill on display as they defended their network from the Red Team. Special props go to the team from the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering for taking the top score.

I’m sure everyone who participated is already on their way to a promising career in information security. As I mentioned to several people at the event, Napera has intern and full time positions open and we welcome inquiries at careers@napera.com.

All eyes were on screens as the competition started Saturday morning.