Compliance Management

This Swedish company will, I predict, set the benchmark here in the United States for how access to applications should be controlled. AppGate has helped shape the direction of network infrastructure security in Europe for some years, and now this innovator is bringing its unique thoughts to the States.

When your price starts at $50,000 and you are unique in your marketplace, you'd better have a good product. For Mu Dynamics, that is just where the story starts. When I first met the Mu folks, they were Mu Security. A new name later, they still are the innovators they were a couple of years ago. My conversation with a Mu visionary was an eye-opener.

I just love these folks. Take the best open source pen testing tool you can think of, put it on steroids, give it a user interface that makes it simple and fast to pen test in a production environ­ment without losing the granularity of manual testing if you need it, and you have Core Impact. Well, almost. Every year I say that I am going to find a better tool, and I actually do comb the market -- unsuccessfully.

How do you differentiate a product that keeps getting mixed up with a commod­itized market, but really doesn't belong there? What differentiators do you look for that can keep you from being included in a herd where you don't belong?

ArcSight gets a lot of play among security experts in the security event management (SEM)/security information manager (SIM) game.

Sometimes you run across a company that just deserves to be selected as an innova­tor. You look them over and won­der why you didn't pick up on them before. Mandiant is one of those companies. There is a reason, of course. Mandiant started as a services company providing forensics, litigation support and incident response. So if you were in the product purchasing mood, you would not have run across these folks.

Sometimes a different approach is needed. The notion of the UTM was developed from the need to consolidate point solutions. There are a lot of problems, of course. They cost more to buy and manage, they use more power and they need a sophisticated staff to manage them.

If you thought the UTM market was crowded, take a look at the intrusion prevention systems (IPS) market. We bluntly asked our innovator in this product space why they thought that they were innovators in such a commoditized market. The answer was immediate and unambiguous: "When a product category becomes mainstream, there are big opportunities, but you must innovate to take advantage of them."