Interop NYC - the early Tuesday returns

I am at Interop '06 in New York City this week for analyst, press and customer meetings and to help with the launch of our release of Safe Access 5.0. I'm really looking forward to the conference as well as catching up with some friends in the industry here. I'll try to recap any interesting events and findings over the next few days.

Here's an early look at some announcements I'm following at the Interop conference:

• Trusted Network Connect of Trusted Computing Group makes the debut of some new participants (pdf) along with interoperability demonstrations. I would particularly like to welcome a partner of StillSecure's, Extreme Networks, to the TNC family of supporters.


• Big iron UTM vendor Crossbeam and ISS (now IBM) announce an alliance to offer carrier and enterprise IPS (intrusion prevention system) on high performance switches for large networks.


• StillSecure announces "the best gets better" with Safe Access 5.0's single-pane-of-glass management, high availability, load balancing and role-based access for enterprise NAC. Last week StillSecure announced it's supports for the Cisco and Microsoft NAC-NAP integration.


• Dave Greenstein, StillSecure's Chief Software Architect, appears on a "deploying NAC" panel moderated by Joel Synder of Opus One along with Microsoft, Cisco, Juniper, and the Trusted Computing Group.


• Foundry announces plans for its ServerIron 4G to speed up client interactions (by taking on SSL encryption, layer 4-7 server load balancing and application firewalls) with web and application servers.


• On the heals of it's recent partnership with Microsoft to go after the SMB branch-office-box market, Citrix announces two appliances based on the same WANScaler network acceleration/optimization technology.


• Misc. new company and product entrants into the NAC market space. (Frankly, its surprising VCs are still funding "me too" NAC companies this late in the game.)

I'll keep you posted as more unfolds during Interop. If you have any questions or news of your own please email me at mitchell@mitchellashley.com.