Peter Kuper: Rubber Meets the Road - Empowering the Enterprise to "Rip & Replace"

We’ve been focusing a good amount of our recent posts on the economy and macro themes.  Some may ask: why is that?  In fact, at least one NY Forum participant said essentially just that. “We all know it’s bad out there – so what?”  The “so what” is that the ones that act as a deer in the headlights – who see it coming but don’t move – are more than likely going to complete that analogy as represented by the unemployment line.

Implications of the macro analysis include managing vendor consolidation, pricing pressure, and vendor lock-in, to name a few. There’s also the issue of a prolonged weak economy – we anticipate some products to be eliminated as vendor companies look to trim costs. So even being an existing solution from a “big” vendor does not guarantee your product immunity to this economy. The world truly is different this time.

It may seem too simple for us to recommend that the security buyer bang on their vendors’ desktops demanding significant discounts. Actually, it is that simple. Times are tough and every company desperately wants that sale. But for those who come across the vendor that wants to stare you down, we need to arm you with the ability to truly walk – tell them they’re out and there’s no turning back.  Normally, the rip out scenario is not all that simple. And that requires we get out of our ivory tower and come down to ground zero to advance the strategy to execution. The key is to make sure the replacement solution pricing more than covers the additional one-time costs from the switch.

Low Hanging Fruit

For certain products, the rip out can be fairly straightforward; an IPS appliance is a swap, tuning, reporting issues aside. Firewalls are a similar argument that would be even more straightforward if the vendors would advance their configuration interfaces. Fortunately, for practitioners, there are solution providers like Tufin enabling better management. SourceFire and Tenable are companies we’ve mentioned in earlier posts that are enjoying dramatic growth due to their relative low price and increasing functionality. It’s the agent-based switches that we worry about most.

 

“It’s All for Nothing if You Don’t Have Freedom”

William Wallace

Agent-based technologies are typically a little more involved and cumbersome given the distributed physical aspects alone.  But hope springs eternal in tech land as the innovation yet again comes from the privates. Consider the following: you are a Symantec or a McAfee shop and you want to see your anti-virus pricing get slashed. (You really do want to see this – why are you paying a premium for a mature signature-based technology??) So, the night before your meeting with your existing provider rep, who is looking for a renewal or more, you watch "Braveheart" four times over two bottles of wine and prepare for battle. 

The rep for said shop listens to your demands and states that your company will no longer be receiving updates unless you sign the renewal agreement at the current price. In the game of vendor lock-in chess he just said: “Check.” After your next volley of indignant words finish reverberating off the office walls, said rep smiles then proceeds to tell you (in an English accent of course) that there is no discounting program in place right now, but continues with something along the lines of “because I value our relationship, I’ll call HQ and fight for 6% off – just for you.” You, of course, want 40-50% off (yes, that much) and they say 10% is the best they can do, final offer.

Even better, if you want to limit the relationship and ask for a one year deal, they won’t discount at all, and the one year deal is the highest markup as they want to either force you into a multi-year deal at a discount or extract the most dollars possible in case you do finally defect. This is now the game of chicken; he knows it will cost you something measurable to switch – even just considering the man-hours needed to effectively rip and replace. Moreover, what if there’s a problem with the rollout – do you want to be one on the hook for a bad call? He knows this, and you know this too…

But here is the opportunity. Calling the other vendors – be it McAfee, Sophos, Symantec or Trend to name a few, or Google and Microsoft to name a few more, and letting them know you are looking at a replacement, the discounting will immediately come in at 30% or better depending on the overall size of deal and tangential sales opportunities. But even if you get the 30% off a $1million deal, how much of that $300,000 is going to be soaked up by the 53 steps needed to remove SAV 9.x? And these costs can increase further if there are any failures in the actual rip and subsequent replace. But vendors are working on this as well. McAfee has been steadily improving their tools, and we’ve found a powerful solution comes from our customer checks in BigFix. From our regular industry checks, we’ve spoken with BigFix users including one managing over 200,000 nodes that can handle all major anti-virus vendors’ agents as well as pushing patches for its Microsoft nodes in hours – 4 hours for this particular user.

There’s some very real ROI to be had from that alone. We also like the ROI analysis tool BigFix can make available before any purchase decision is made. What we value here is the ability to input various operational levers to create different outcomes – think the man hours are too few? Crank up the FTE-related inputs. Hardware cost debate? You can tweak those as you determine appropriate.  Finally, we also like the other ancillary benefits of the solution such as a power save mode that can lower electricity consumption to help pay for the BigFix licensing costs alone, irrespective of any vendor switch-driven savings.

We have seen BigFix in action thanks to the IANS community – members sharing their success stories and frustrations. BigFix is not a singular example; we’ve mentioned SourceFire and Tenable in prior posts for similar reasons. IANS users are saving money and increasing their security profile. BigFix is cited here in an effort to help our members think through the concept of cost saving strategies and translate it into actionable ideas.

To wit: IANS is hosting BigFix’s Director of Product Marketing in Boston next week to directly answer IANS members’ questions. And we have our own list to make sure we get to the good and the bad. As always, we recommend you lever the IANS community, from peers to faculty. Making a difference in your organization is always a goal; delivering significant value-add to your organization in this environment will make you stand far above the crowd – both internally and externally.  Happy hunting.