NAC vendor Caymas still kicking

Don't believe speculation company went out of business, executive says.

NAC vendor Caymas Systems is not out of business.

Sure, that can be said about a lot of companies, but it’s important to say about Caymas because there has been so much recent speculation that the network access control company was shutting down.

This includes one published report that the company’s Web site had gone dark and its phones had been shut off, both of which were true. But those issues didn’t add up to going out of business, according to Caymas’ marketing director, Sridhar Venkatesh.

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NAC vendor Caymas Systems is not out of business.

Sure, that can be said about a lot of companies, but it’s important to say about Caymas because there has been so much recent speculation that the network access control company was shutting down.

This includes one published report that the company’s Web site had gone dark and its phones had been shut off, both of which were true. But those issues didn’t add up to going out of business, according to Caymas’ marketing director, Sridhar Venkatesh.

Instead, the company ran into some unspecified troubles with venture capitalists that resulted in shutting down its Petaluma, Calif., office and moving the staff to headquarters in San Jose, Venkatesh says. “There were some issues with venture capitalists that we did get sorted out,” he says.

Caymas also laid off about five workers, bringing headcount down to 25. The layoffs and closing an office were part of an attempt to reduce costs to stay in step with the financial roadmap for the company, according to Venkatesh.

Last summer the company shifted from selling its gear through channel partners to selling through its own sales staff in an attempt to land business from larger businesses. The channel strategy was aimed at small and midsize businesses, Venkatesh says.

Caymas was ranked as "visionary" last year by Gartner, a category that means the market research firm thinks the company is strong on vision but weak on execution.

Caymas is different from other NAC vendors in that it intends its products to be used in front of data centers to protect servers. Other vendors stress more that they check the security posture of devices before they are allowed on networks at all.