Why Lockdown Networks went belly up

Lockdown Networks went belly up last week and a former employee offers a pretty good explanation of why.

Chris Boscolo worked for the company and now works for a NAP startup (that’s network access protection, Microsoft’s version of NAC) called Napera, for which he recently started a blog.

He makes some excellent points quoted below, but the bottom line is that in the brutally Darwinian world of startups, you’d better have a well defined problem that you’re solving for a well defined set of customers and then deliver on your promises.

It’s true of the market for any new technology and Lockdown’s case just proves the rule. It’s not the first NAC vendor to fall by the wayside and it won’t be the last.

Here’s part of what Boscolo has to say:

“Lockdown’s appeal was also Lockdown’s Achilles’ heel. Customers wanted NAC enforced at all of their switches - all the different brands, all the different firmware, even that old Cisco 2900 running an ancient version of CatOS. These switches weren’t designed to be manipulated so extensively over SNMP. Many product installs were delayed because of time spent uncovering obscure bugs in vendor switching software.

“…In the early days of Enforcer there was a lack of focus on the new NAC opportunity. Instead, they allowed trickles of revenue from a dying vulnerability assessment product to steal their attention. Later it was the inability to focus on the sweet spot in their market - the switches that had the lion’s share of the ports. Instead, they took a shotgun approach trying to add support for every obscure switch needed for the next 'big deal'.

“Focus is key in a startup.”

You can read the rest of Boscolo’s blog here.