The Ashimmy Blog: Spring is in the air

I know you may not be feeling this way depending on where you live, but Spring is in the air. How do I know? Easy, my anniversary has just passed. For the 19 years I have been married, I know that once my anniversary is over it will soon be Spring. Sort of my own bird like instinct maybe. When we were first married we used to go to Maui every year for our anniversary. It is always Spring in Maui, but by the time we would come home in early March, Spring was certainly on the way. Of course with the kids we don’t get to Maui much, but I watched a pre-season baseball game today, what more proof do you need then that?

So what does Spring have to do with anything? Spring represents a rebirth. I think we need a rebirth. We need to stop dwelling on the negative and start making our own luck and our own positives! To quote a greater thinker than I, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”. So take my word for it, Spring is on the way. Start thinking about how you are going to break out of the winter/economy doldrums and attack your job, your life and your problems head on.

Good luck with that!

Mike Rothman gave me a nice shout out yesterday in his blog about copying his format. Besides thanking Mike, I want to say that I am thinking of this as just doing a few short blog/comments in one post. I will of course add my own Shimmy schtick to it, but I like it. I will still do full posts when I see something I want to talk about. I am interested though if you readers like this type of blogging. Let me know.
The law of conservation of energy – Adrian Lane over on Securosis has a nice commentary up on the recent Symantec/Ponemon FUD that employees leaving their employment are taking IP and confidential data with them and that this number has gone up drastically. As Adrian points out, no crap Sherlock! With all of the people being laid off, there are certainly more people leaving work. The real issue though is how many of these people actually dong anything with this information. It reminded me studying science with my oldest son Landon. The law of conservation of energy says that the amount of energy doesn’t change, just the form does. So really this is a potential threat, like potential energy. It remains to be seen if it will translate into anything more than that. Adrian says no, I say it desperate people do desperate things.
Dead men walking – While reading this story about Nortel laying off another 3200 people today I was reminded of a potential customer call I was on a while back for NAC. They were also looking at Nortel’s NAC solution and the CIO was telling me how good he felt dealing with a company Nortel’s size and the stability it offered over StillSecure. My how the mighty have fallen!
Its not a product, its a feature – Hoff loves to spout that one. I was reminded of the same thing today reading the article in Computer World by Mark Everett Hall that SaaS is not a market, just another channel. I actually agree with that statement and is one of the driving forces behind StillSecure’s recent ProtectPoint acquisition. While many folks including Rothman question an organizations ability to sell service and product, I view the service offering as just another distribution channel. Customers can buy our products as a hardware appliance, software or as a service. I think long term that view of SaaS is going to proven correct.
Firewall tools – I recorded a great podcast earlier this week with Secure Passage CTO Jody Brazil. Jody is the former CTO of Fishnet and Secure Passage was originally spun out from Fishnet with the Firemon product. It is totally independent of FishNet now and is coming out of stealth mode. My recording equipment messed up and am waiting on Mitchell to send me his file to edit. In the meantime Brian Prince of eWeek has a good interview with Jody. My view on this one is that PCI is totally driving this market. The issue is will it be a victim of its own success. If it becomes big enough the firewall vendors will do a better job of packaging management tools with the firewalls and the 3rd party tools will find it hard to compete. But who knows, maybe they get bought out by then.