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Cisco to Acquire Perfigo
MisterFuRR writes "Looks like Cisco is going to acquire Perfigo. Perfigo is a developer of packaged network access control solutions that provide endpoint policy analysis, compliance, and access enforcement capabilities. I can just see it now: Linksys routers with stickers that say 'Perfigo Ready.'"
Why is Cisco doing this? Surely they can do better.
There are. The Sherman Antitrust Act, for one. The problem is enforcement.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...if you can't innovate, just acquire and extort. It worked for Microsoft.
You know, that's the worst abuse of the word ecosystem I've ever heard.
I guess *BSD is the spotted owl here.
Perfigo was funded by a venture capital firm. Their whole purpose was to either a) make a bunch of money selling their stuff to individual customers b) make a bunch of money selling the stuff to a larger company
i re fox-a&q=100+best+companies+to+work+for+cisco&btnG= Search
Cisco, for years, has aquired many smaller companies for the technology and/or ideas the smaller companies have.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=f
I recall reading that cisco was among the top 100 companies to work for in the US. Rated by their employees...
Cisco is dying
'Perfigo is a developer of packaged network access control solutions that provide endpoint policy analysis, compliance, and access enforcement capabilities.'
It's all so clear to me now.
Hmmm...I thought the problem was Bush. Oh my bad...same thing.
I could choose: Nokia firewall, Juniper router, HP switches, Brocade SAN, and M$ radius server or I could cut one check to Cisco and get pretty much all the same function out of a combination of their boxes.
I'm not saying that it is right or wrong, but it is not a monopoly.
Quick survey. Does your organization use perfigo? or bluesocket?
I can just see it now: Linksys routers with stickers that say 'Perfigo Ready.'
:p
Good thinking, gumshoe!!
Cisco joins a long chain of American companies who buy out the little guy, thus increasing monopolization. There should be laws against this sort of thing
Cisco does not have a chance at monopoly status. They also aren't buying a rival router manufacturer, just acquiring a company which will add to their technology portfolio.
But, monopolies in themselves aren't illegal. I learned that in the third week of "economics". It is the actions of companies that get them into trouble. The definition of monopoly in my econ book reads something like: One business that can fulfill market demand at cheaper prices than two or more companies.
Basically, it can be good for the consumer in some cases (think gas & electric) which is why being a monopoly isn't illegal. It's when others try to take your sole status and you crush them and the innovation they would bring to the table...
Get your Unix fortune now!
And I've always wondered why liberals resort to fit throwing when they don't get their way.
I honestly cannot understand how: 1. This article was accepted with the typo - it's acquire not aquire. 2. Nobody else noticed this error. Weird isn't it?
The purpose of any company is to make a bunch of money. I'm not sure what your point is. I think it's great when a large company such as Cisco can bring a promising but under-utilized technology to market by acquiring a company. If this leads to fewer ddos's, great.
On another note, there's a great gem of market-speak in this pr:
"CleanMachines' turnkey approach directly complements Cisco NAC, which leverages a systems architecture approach that is more appropriate for Enterprise customers."
Why is "Enterprise" capitalized?
Can we /. Cisco?
If we manage to do it, I will be very impressed.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I can just see it now: Linksys routers with stickers that say 'Perfigo Ready.'"
I just see more open WAPs myself. =D
I've often wondered why Republicans attack, kill and destroy anything that they fear.
Yeah cause the gas and electric monopolies produce a real affordable product.
And the alternative produces rolling california blackouts. Point: utility monopolies.
Not only that, but apparently
Perfigo is a developer of packaged network access control solutions...
(Emphasis mine).
The situation you're thinking of is the one where competition produces overlap, redundancies and inefficiencies. In Canada, for example, Rogers has a monopoly on the installation, maintenance and management of cable TV lines. They can also sell cable access over these lines, but so can everyone else. Bell has a similar monopoly over telephone infrastructure, but other companies can sell services over this infrastructure. This is because having two companies put down phone lines down the same street is inefficient - you only need one phone line, not two. Having only one phone line benefits the consumer. Having only one company sell services over the phone line does NOT benefit the consumer.
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
Thanks for the nice press release. Notice how the Perfigo website didn't make the posting - Maybe Perfigo was in fear that it'd stuffer from the /. effect?
Use a fucking spellchecker.
Cisco has a history of buying small companies to increase their product lineup for as long as i can remember. Kalpana, Stratacom, etc etc etc - FYI
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
...we all noticed, we just thought we'd let you make an ass of yourself by being a whiny little bitch about a minor typo.
...young fella, we cut down our use of cisco, thank you very much, and switched to polyunsaturates without hydrolysed vegetable oils. Yes, I know them biscuits don't work as good, but really, if you want REAL merakan biscuits, real honest to goodness creamy chewy gut bomb gourmet goodnesses, go for the gusto and use pure lard! For everything else, pure virgin olive oil!
The Sherman Act has been mostly understood as forbidding monopolies gained through illegal means. In the Supreme Court's eyes, legitimate monopolies can exist that do not fall under the Sherman Act. In those cases, they see the Sherman Act as unapplicable fundamentally; enforcement of the Sherman Act is not the issue, rather, the judges actually disagree on whether the Act applies in the first place.
Don't forget VLANsm. Yes, I know they didn't technically invent them but it their entirely fucked up implementation that we're stuck using today. Use of Cisco's pre-standard implementation of VLANs was so widespread that the IEEE working group for 802.1Q had to more or less disregard all other implementations, some superior and some not, and give a thumbs up to to Cisco or they risked writing a standard that no one would use because the world's largest LAN infrastructure company wanted to do it their own way. Think of it like Microsoft deciding to ignore the W3C's newest HTML or XML standard and writing their entire suite of applications to embrace their own competing standard. In the end Cisco's VLAN implementation is what we're stuck with and it sucks when compared to what we could have had. Cisco's implementation didn't even have rudimentary authentication built into the standard. 802.1Q devices implicitly trust the VLAN advertisements they get on a trunk port as gospel. Thanks Cisco for fucking this up. We netadm's sure do appreciate it.
Cisco, for years, has aquired many smaller companies
At least we are consistent.
The
Apart from (extremely long list), what have the Romans ever done for us?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yea, I found the article boring when scanning superficially. But after reading the perfigo site faq, its clear there's a potential for "synergy" between cisco and perfigo's products. It may be one of those [very] rare acquisitions that adds value for investors (and customers).
At UCSC, we use Perfigo's SecureSmart servers for making it safe to plug the students' computers into the school network. It's bad.
The server is constantly going down. Get this: It checks every 6 hours to make sure that it's currently registered. Frequently, it forgets that it's registered or Perfigo's registration server scrambles its licenses or something, because the dorm network then goes down. This happens about once per week.
The system is based on a router running Red Hat 7 on commodity x86 machines. Last I heard, it was still using Linux 2.4.9. The upgrade procedure is a drive reimage. The actual routing goes on in a proprietary routing program with fairly low performance. The scanning is done with a customized Nessus. The administration is some custom PHP (IIRC) code, with no security roles and complete control via a single password.
Furthermore, the source to the free software they use, they refuse to send to the customer. Somebody really should see if they can sue Perfigo for violation of the GPL.
Ignoring the above, the Resnet administrator has set up the SecureSmart server to scan PCs for the usual Windows problems. If it finds one, he has it set up to let the user see only antivirus pages and Windows Update. Then it's supposed to scan the user's computer again after 24 hours. What usually happens is that the user's computer doesn't get an IP address anymore, ever, and the administrator has to unblock the specific MAC manually (using his single password).
I'm guessing that we're still using it because the administrator feels that he has invested too much effort into it already. I don't know exactly what Cisco was thinking. Perfigo is just a bad investment.
If you're also going to UCSC, you should check out https://api.alkaid.org/ It's currently a bit out of date, but it shows that the administrator should have known not to use Perfigo.
Have a nice time.
Their previous funding... http://www.greylock.com/companies/default.asp/
I thought that read Crisco aquires Perfigo?????
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I haven't decided which is worse: the problem or the solution.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
Cisco has more bandwidth than Torvalds?* We need to do something about that.
The pipe to the server containing Linux has at least 1 Gbps of sustained throughput. How big is Cisco.com's pipe?
Perfigo's products are really pretty good, and if they can get the testing and R&D support of Cisco behind them, it'll be a good thing in my opinion.
matguy(.com)
Myth: The *BSDs collectively used the claims that they were dead to cash in on their life insurance policies. This made them all incredibly rich and powerful. Further, being dead caused an unexpeted inline merge with God, causing some machines to become omnipotent. (How else do you explain an Intel-based OS blasting five petabits down a network?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In my router configuration it says "Linksys, a division of Cisco."
will this now become:
"Linksys, a division of Cisco. Perfigo ready!"
at what point will Cisco stop? I can see it now "Cisco acquires Sysco" (Where Sysco will be its retail arm.) --
"Linksys, a division of Cisco. Perfigo ready! Distributed by Sysco."
I think even Cisco will use normal servers for normal task, like webservers. Will be a dificult one, maybe the more dificult, but circo will not use akamai or other ninja tool, so a good slasht can break is server.
Anyway I think this news is not interesting enough to drive the trafik needed.
-Woof woof woof!
We've got a similar setup with our 'campus manager' 'solution'. I swear, it causes more trouble than the benefits it provides.
RESNET admins, for the most part, are generally control freaks who lack the skills to track down problems on their own, have no idea how to fix them, and need vendors and consultants to handle everything. It usually has a lot to do with occupational succession in a school environment, I think.
Anyway, we're already wasting resources on our 'remediation server' for next year, and our plan, no joke, is to keep all users at XP SP1. FOREVER. We're going to disable the firewall on SP2 machines, opening up our number-one defense from worms, just so we can brag about having 'remediation capabilities'. Oh yeah, our registration system binds to the MAC address, so we have no way to allow wireless in the dorms or student areas.
I keep telling them that the best way to handle the network is to allow all access, but place a small sniffer on every subnet. When something goes horribly wrong we can look at the sniffer to see the source MAC address, then look up the port for that MAC addy on the switch management software and head to that room to fix the problem.
There's no point in investing hundreds of admin man-hours every year to get registration and remediation running when we can get similar results from a few dozen hours of desktop support.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
NetPass is an opensource alternative that's rapidly approaching 1.0 status.
Small colleges like the one I work at do not have the bandwith/resources to weather a huge worm/virus/ddos hit so we evaluated Bradford, Perfigo, StillSecure and Cisco's products. Cisco was ~100,000 and we'd have to put in end to end switches, we're a all-girl liberal arts private college so that is out of the question money wise. Bradford didn't understand the impact of firewalls on the market (at the time, they've changed their tune recently). StillSecure has a great roadmap, but a 5 year old could get around the security. Perfigo was the best of what was out there, and we did have the disconnect problems described by the previous poster, but we worked with Perfigo and got everything fixed, no issues at all since the last (and did not have to re-image like the previous poster said) 10-minute patch. My fear is this: Perfigo's reporting engine was/is terrible, Cisco is not known for UI improvements, hell not even known for a UI. Plus, we got a great deal from Perfigo, they were understanding to our situation and worked on the price, Cisco could give a rats ass about our business, so I fear we'll not be able to afford Perfigo in the future. Perfigo has amazing support, and most people that I talk to that complain about their installation have never called Perfigo to work with them on the problem. Three months into the school year, we've had 0 worms hit us, 0 DDoS attacks going outbound, and we know that no rouge access points are connected to our tiny internet pipe (ok there is one was to get one set up, but this is a liberal arts college, kismet shows nothing out there).
Gee, Cisco bought another bad-aid partial solution to the worm and virus problem, that only addresses symptoms and does not have any hope of working on a zero-day worm in a production environment. That is what, five they have bought now, none of which solve the problem?
'cuz we'll put a boot in your ass its the American way.
Here in Ohio.. Sysco is a food distribution network. Delivering food stuffs to wholesalers/retailers/and food service places..