Symantec, Juniper unite to fight security threats
Juniper Networks and Symantec last week announced they have formed a broad strategic partnership that includes product development in areas of unified threat management, intrusion-prevention systems and endpoint compliance.
Scott Kriens, chair and CEO of Juniper, and John Thompson, chair and CEO of Symantec, said Juniper will take the lead in building hardware appliances, with Symantec providing software-based antivirus and antispam content filtering. The partnership ends Symantec’s struggle to develop appliance-based hardware that is the foundation for Symantec Gateway Security (SGS) products.
“Customer hardware development was not our forte,” Thompson said.
Jeremy Burton, group president of security and data management at Symantec, indicated that the company will provide customer support for SGS appliances for the next three years or so, with content updates. “But we won’t materially enhance the features sets,” he said. When customer contracts expire, Symantec will recommend a “comparable Juniper box,” he said.
For Juniper, the partnership that brings together the marketing, sales and engineering teams of the companies is expected to lead to the development of new UTM appliances, especially for service providers.
Hitesh Sheth, vice president of enterprise products and solutions at Juniper, said the company’s Secure Services Gateway line of UTMs is for enterprises and carriers. While Symantec provides only antispam content filtering for Juniper UTM appliances, its antivirus content filtering will be added in the future. Future UTM products developed with Symantec will rely on Juniper’s firewall and IPS technology, he said.
In addition, the firms will collaborate on developing new endpoint security software, starting with licensing Juniper’s 802.1x supplicant software to Symantec.
The strategic partnership is not exclusive, however, and Juniper and Symantec do not foresee changes associated with vendor partners that already exist. For instance, Kaspersky Lab is an antivirus software provider on Juniper security gear.
Gartner analyst John Pescatore said the underlying motivation behind the Juniper-Symantec partnership appears to be “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – that enemy being Cisco.
Other UTM news includes a partnership agreement being announced this week between Crossbeam Systems and Internet Security Systems (ISS) to collaborate on a carrier-class UTM appliance.
According to Clarence Morey, director of market development at ISS, and Throop Wilder, vice president of marketing at Crossbeam, the companies will work together on a high-end device that carriers, wireless providers and ISPs could use to provide managed IPS services.
The UTM appliance, expected out later this quarter, would be based on virtual-domain technology and IPS filtering from ISS integrated into a Crossbeam-built box.
