It Takes a Village.. ah, actually, being there first and tons of hard work

I'm proud to say my old company pulled a two out of three and won the SC Magazine best endpoint solution of 2008 award again at RSA. They were also finalists in three other product categories, products all of which I can beamingly say I had a hand in creating. What's different about the SC Mag awards from many others is these awards are voted on by the readers, both users and followers of what's happening in the market. While others have suffered the percentages of the startup business, others march on to live another day.

The NAC market has been a tough slog, one of those markets that's experienced a great deal of attention and hype. None the less, products have to prove themselves, no matter how shiny and exciting they seem to be or how big the analysts say the market will be in five years. NAC's not an easy problem to solve and I'm proud the StillSecure has stuck with it to continue leading the market against heavyweights like Cisco. Frankly, this market could be all sown up if Cisco had purchased the right product several years back. (And guess which product that would be, I say tongue in check. :) )

I always enjoyed the claims other startup vendors would make about "being there first" and owning "xx" double percentages of the market, when in fact I was part of creating one of the first purpose-built NAC products from the ground up before NAC was even a term. The idea came from customer experience interviews I was doing for a completely different product idea, and up popped the customer problem that later became a NAC product. I still remember the excitement of sharing the idea with the team. Serendipity I say.

Net-Net, congratz to my old team on the awards and the continued market successes. The award is just one of the ways to visibly see all that hard work pay off.