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IBM to Buy ISS for $1.3 Billion
gerald626 writes "IBM announced today that they have formed an agreement to purchase ISS for 1.3 billion dollars." From the article: " The all-cash transaction of about $28 per share is meant to bolster IBM's ability to deliver security services to corporations, the company said. ISS builds network protection products and services, including intrusion detection and monitoring tools. IBM said it intends to use ISS's expertise and software to provide more robust security-related services to its corporate customers."
McCoy: Psst! Jim! He's talking about Internet Security Systems!
:P)
(Kirk looks sheepish)
Kirk: Doh!
(IBM rolls its eyes)
(Yes, of course I knew what TFA was talking about. The headline, however, was just too good to pass up!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Hey, glad to see ISS's PR department knows about Slashdot. And, hey! You're right, I was affected by the product line "simplification"! Glad to meet you, now sit down and listen.
Knifing the Nokia relationship left lots of enterprise customers in the dust, not because it was done, but it was done while 1) the product was still being actively pushed by both companies, and 2) without an assessment of what impact it would have on the customer base. Let's face it, the Nokia stuff was axed because ISS wanted to enter the appliance space, without regard to existing deployments. I still remember the arrogant tact of ISS's sales staff when they approached us with the news AND a quote for replacing all of our deployments with Proventia -- it was 20% higher than our TCO on Nokia! That was, and still is, a bad BUSINESS move, and left a lot of customers with a bad taste in their mouths about ISS. That aside...
I find your assertion about the Proventia G and M being "wildly popular" a bit dubious for a product that has only had about a year and a half in the market (and, yes, I'm counting that from the launch of the G400 and G2000 -- as an enterprise customer, they're the only ones we every considered). I talk with a lot of ISS customers. The big ones -- the truly big ones -- consider themselves saddled with their Proventia investment. They see other vendors coming in providing multi-gigabit solutions that operate at wire speeds on all packet sizes... They see IPS functionality being rolled into core switch fabrics, some of them on general purpose blades... They begin to wonder why they're invested in edge IPS when their firewalls are starting to gain the same feature functionality... And they get angry when a Core update munges their SiteProtector AGAIN... Leave the assessment of "wildly popular" to the point in time when these users report themselves as being totally satisfied with the investment they've made, not because our installed base is X^2 instead of X.
I know you've still got a "general purpose" network sensor out there. We used to run a few of those, until we had little nagging issues with XPUs where the proposed solution was "get to Proventia" because "that's where the development is being done now". And although your Network Sensor has an "inline mode," I know for a fact that your sales force actively steers people away from using it as an IPS. Having a product available is not the same as being able to provide undeniably good support for it -- just ask CA about that one.
As for the BlackICE (nee Desktop Protector, nee Proventia Desktop) installation, hey; what can I say? I wish we could all adopt a product at a point along its lifespan where everything is as we want it. But that didn't happen for us -- and for other customers (mostly bleeding-edge adopters). To speak to the "integration" with SiteProtector, I'd say the selling point there is relatively limited compared to what it was proposed to be when sold to us. But what do I know? I'm just a guy that has to redeploy a bunch of crap that will be replaced by GPO-managed Windows firewall rules and next-gen platform health checking that Microsoft will eventually give us for free. For the second time.
Thanks for the response, though.