Security Watch | Matt Hines » Vernier changes tack, more change ahead for NAC?

January 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Vernier changes tack, more change ahead for NAC?

TAGS: Security

Count Vernier Networks among the newest casualties of the NAC market's continued maturation.

While offering few additional details, company officials have confirmed industry reports that the firm has renamed itself and plans to re-focus its operations.

While the NAC appliance maker's Web site remains the same, the vendor has changed its phone messages to reflect the fact that it will henceforth be known as Autonomic Networks.

Industry sources maintain that the firm -- founded in 2001 -- is attempting to take its NAC products and expand them into a broader platform for role-based access control for both networks and other IT systems, including software applications.

According to a report filed late last week by my former InfoWorld and eWeek colleague -- and current 451 Group analyst, Paul Roberts -- Vernier's inline NAC appliance technology itself may also be up for sale.

Roberts contends that some other smaller NAC vendors may also be considering similar moves, and that some of the larger players, including Cisco, Symantec and Microsoft, may be looking to add to their existing product sets.

ConSentry and Nevvis Networks -- both direct rivals of Vernier -- could be among the other NAC providers looking to be sold, or under consideration for a buyout from the bigger fish, he said.

According to the 451 Group report, Vernier has taken on as much as $100 million in venture funding and other debt in the past, and is now rolling its existing financing into a new series A round to back Autonomic. Allegis Capital and Doll Capital Management are cited as leading investors.

In addition, Bruce Smith has replaced Simon Khalaf as Autonomic's CEO. Other top officials with the company, including its VP of engineering, Sohail Parekh, and its CFO, Bhupi Singh, have also reportedly departed, with Parekh moving to rival security appliance maker Infoblox.

The company has reportedly downsized significantly over the last several years, falling from almost 100 employees to its estimated current total of 50.

According to Roberts, Autonomic is positioning itself as a provider of "individually virtualized infrastructure" a new twist on identity or role-based access control that will utilize some of Vernier's legacy intellectual property.

It would seem that Vernier wasn't ever able to make the big splash that it once hoped to in the NAC space, which saw a rush of vendor activity over the last three years as compliance regulations and data breaches drove businesses to invest in new controls for handing out access to their networks -- and perhaps more importantly, to protect their broader IT infrastructure from the threat of infected laptops coming back into the workplace.

However, some industry pundits, including StillSecure's Alan Shimel, have long predicted that many firms that rushed into the space were merely trying to repurpose "failed business models," such as hard-to-sell intrusion prevention tools, to hop on the NAC bandwagon.

The big picture trend here would appear to be that smaller vendors dependent on demand for NAC point products to hit their numbers are going to begin looking for exit strategies.

While some smaller vendors have been able to make it this far, the NAC game would appear to be heading in the direction of favoring large companies like Cisco and Juniper to provide the network-based element of the systems in their infrastructure gear, with the endpoint piece coming from well-established desktop security companies like Symantec, McAfee, Sophos and even Microsoft.

In my recent interviews with the CEOs of Symantec and McAfee, both executives cited NAC as a growing area of interest -- and Cisco and Microsoft have continued to push forward their own respective strategies and products.

Some smaller vendors, such as FireEye -- which has repositioned itself as an anti-botnet specialist over the last two years -- and now Vernier, appear to have seen the writing on the wall and moved to get ahead of the crowd before some sort of NAC diaspora begins.

According to Roberts, 2008 may be the year when the NAC market both thins out and finally begins to hit its stride among buyers.

"Next year is do or die for network access control startups, as enterprises with budgets for NAC decide which vendors they will go with," he said in the report. "It seems to be Vernier's day of reckoning: all signs point to a shakeout. Should Vernier decide to spin out its NAC product line, we're more sanguine that it would find a buyer, as more than one diversified security vendor tells us it is considering a NAC appliance play."

Posted by Matt Hines on January 7, 2008 09:00 AM

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