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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.'"

11 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Re:More monopolization by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are. The Sherman Antitrust Act, for one. The problem is enforcement.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  2. A rich ecosystem? by e9th · · Score: 5, Funny
    [Cisco] NAC provides a rich ecosystem...

    You know, that's the worst abuse of the word ecosystem I've ever heard.

    I guess *BSD is the spotted owl here.

  3. Re:More monopolization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    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=fi re fox-a&q=100+best+companies+to+work+for+cisco&btnG= Search

    I recall reading that cisco was among the top 100 companies to work for in the US. Rated by their employees...

  4. I see... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    '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.

    1. Re: I see... by ShinmaWa · · Score: 4, Informative

      I am not familiar with Perfigo, but it seems as though they make equipment which will not allow a device to obtain non-trivial network access unless/until it has been shown to be up to snuff according to various configurable criteria

      Got it in one! Right on.

      That's exactly what Perfigo does. Its becoming rather popular on college campuses to protect their networks from morons coming back from summer vacation with their laptops and desktops loaded with worms, virii, trojans, major security holes, etc.

      --
      The /. Effect: Thousands of users simultaneously accessing a site to not read its content.
  5. Re:More monopolization by w1r3sp33d · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If they choose to buy up the best company in each market, they have still left many others to compete against them in each market.

    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.

  6. Re:More monopolization by ImaLamer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  7. Slashdot challange! by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 4, Funny

    Can we /. Cisco?

    If we manage to do it, I will be very impressed.

    --
    Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
  8. Re:Well... by _Hellfire_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah absolutely!

    Cisco hasn't really done anything for networking in their entire history. Oh except for Standby Router Protocol, and IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol). They also innovated on their own design with EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) Oh they also did Spanning Tree Protocol, VLAN Trunking Protocol, Skinny (a VoIP standard) and Hot Standby Routing Protocol.

    Not to mention Multiple Spanning Tree (MST), a new IEEE standard that grew from Cisco's proprietary
    Multiple Instances Spanning Tree Protocol (MISTP) implementation.

    They also invented NetFlow and WCCP (Web Cache Control Protocol).

    So yeah! No innovation at all from this company that has become the baseline in security and reliability for networking.

    Show some respect, because that Internet connection you're on at the moment is probably brought to you courtesy of Cisco innovation.

    --
    "And then I visited Wikipedia ...and the next 8 hours are a blur..."
  9. VLANs by macdaddy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Is everyone blind or something? by numatrix · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.