* ConSentry will sell more NAC gear with Alcatel-Lucent label
ConSentry NAC gear will be sold with an Alcatel-Lucent label on it as a way for the networking company to provide its business customers with a high-performance intrusion detection and prevention platform.
The ConSentry equipment will perform its usual function of checking whether the behavior of devices already admitted to networks complies with security policies and if not, deal with it.
The plan is for ConSentry LANShield Controllers and Switches to work in conjunction with existing security features within Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniVista family of switches and software.
Alcatel-Lucent plans to put an OmniVista label on the ConSentry gear initially, but both companies say, ultimately, they will likely integrate ConSentry technology into Alcatel hardware.
This is a good deal for ConSentry now because it will sell more boxes marketed and sold through Alcatel-Lucent. The companies have a three year marketing and sales agreement.
This is also an early hint of what is likely to happen to NAC start-ups – the same thing that happens to start-ups in many networking technology fields. A group of them slug it out for a few years selling stand-alone products that supplement existing network infrastructures. Then the best of them are bought up by big networking vendors who incorporate the new technology into their own product lines.
Classic examples are firewalls, IPSec and SSL VPNs.
In the case of NAC, Cisco and Nortel, for instance are building their own technology, but other switch vendors – whereas Alcatel, Extreme and Foundry, rely on alliances with independent NAC vendors to provide these capabilities.
Somewhere down the road, some of these networking vendors will buy up some of the NAC vendors.
