A lot of people were interested in the January 4 announcement that Cisco is purchasing IronPort for $830 million (well, at least they were interested in IronPort news before the iPhone argument between Apple and Cisco got in full swing).
IronPort, a five-year-old, privately held company, makes appliances for Web security and management. From our perspective, this deal certainly seems like a big validation that appliance-based software has an important place in enterprise software ecosystem.
But this notion of appliance-based delivery still seems to be flying under the radar a bit.
In an unscientific search, I found:
- 500 stories on Google News on the Cisco, IronPort acquisition.
- 114 of those stories mentioned anything about an appliance.
If we’ve learned anything this week, it’s that KACE is onto something with Appliance-based Software Delivery (AbSD). It’s just a matter of time before the press realizes how big this appliance thing is.
Interesting view, I wonder whether or not it is right though to insist you package your solution in pre-selected appliances.
Software alone can take advantage of being distributed in virtual machines assisting deployment and maintainability - i.e. a virtual appliance straight out of the box that can be deployed to any part of your organisation.
Is virtualisation something you have considered in your product development model/roadmap?
Posted by: Ed Daniel | February 03, 2007 at 07:16 AM