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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.'"
There are. The Sherman Antitrust Act, for one. The problem is enforcement.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It seems to be Cisco's business strategy lately to acquire other (smaller) companys so they don't have to plunk down the cash for R&D and so that they can make knee-jerk reactions to market demands. What results is a product not ready for prime time that they have little understanding of and the TAC's are as confused as the sys-admins. Their infrastructure devices seem to do a fairly decent job, but try to find any information on their IDS (formerly NetRanger). End of life for these things is less than a year away and documentation is sparse at best. At least their message boards confirm that others are seeing the same problems and we're not just crazy.
...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...
'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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
You can't understand it? It's quite simple. See, there's this website called Slashdot. What happens there is four or five people post the same story to the site. The shortest, most incoherent submission is further mangled by one of the editors and posted to the chosen (by their wallets) ones for an early read. These readers in turn notify the appropriate editor of half a dozen changes, suggestions, and fixes, all of which are ignored when it is posted to rest of the site.
Then some smart aleck in the comments doesn't have anything meaningful to say about the story itself, so he posts an amazed comment about how such an obvious typo could make it through the ever so thorough vetting process.
This is of course followed up by an even worse smart aleck who 'educates' the previous user and the entire thread is subsequently modded as not-funny and off-topic and hopefully removed from the visible comments for most users.
Welcome! Hope you enjoy it here. Oh yeah; almost forgot. You're supposed to make a spelling typo in your spelling correction so that other people can ridicule you too. All part of the fun.
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.