No shows for SSL VPN tests

Those who were invited to take part in our SSL VPN Clear Choice Test but did not take part.

We invited all of the SSL VPN vendors that our research revealed to us to participate in this test. Three important products were not included in this report.

Cisco is in the throes of a major rework of its aging VPN product line. With the introduction of the ASA 5520 last summer, Cisco brought out the necessary hardware, but the company says it has yet wrangled the SSL VPN software to be where it wants it. Cisco asked us to not look at its SSL VPN in this test, because executives there felt they would have a substantial and significant change available as these test results hit the presses.

Symantec, a $19.5 billion company (that’s larger than AEP, Array, Aventail, Caymas, Check Point, F5, Fortinet, Juniper and SonicWall combined) told us that it could not participate in the test, because it didn’t have any hardware to loan us during the testing cycle.

SSL-Explorer is an open source SSL VPN product that we very much wanted to include in our testing. However, because of timing constraints (and the huge number of hours it would have taken to support an open source product for testing) and the large number of vendors already included in this particular test, we were not able to include them.

Citrix, Permeo, and Watchguard all asked to participate in our SSL VPN test. However, because their products didn’t include features that we considered critical to our testing, such as reverse web proxy, we could not fairly compare them to the other products in our test.

Portwise asked to participate in our test, but because of communications problems between Network World and Portwise, we were not able to include them.

SonicWall | Next VPN test by topic: Application/client mobility >