This one is not all security related, but is the ScienceLogic Blog. One of my favorite persons in the IT field Dave Link is the CEO and founder of ScienceLogic. Several other friends from Interliant including Louis Dimiglio (sorry if I messed up the spelling Lou!), Richard Chart and Chris Cordray are also part of the team. They have done a great job of creating a network management product and in a hyper-competitive industry carving out a place for themselves. I am running into them more and more at shows, conferences and in the field. Now they have joined the blogging ranks and it looks like there will be several contributers. They are all smart folks and I am sure will have good things to say, so be sure to check out the blog!

In one article responding to a post I did about where is the interoperational in interop, Dave says that he and the ScienceLogic team had a very different experience at Interop this year. Due to their participation in the InteropNet and ILabs project, ScienceLogic was very involved in making sure the network at Interop was up and running and showing off the many different products and vendors working together. Certainly the work of the many people at Interop Labs and Interop Net show how heterogeneous equipment and technology can work together, but where those labs and network used to be the center of the show, I am not so sure that is the case any more. Many folks walk by the NOC at Interop, peak inside at the folks at the stations, smile and move on. How many actually take the tour compared to how many walk the floor or sit in on presentations. I think in Dave's view it is a case of when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

More importantly though Dave challenges me to answer his questions of what StillSecure has done to promote interoperability with other vendors that we can promote. Great question and it deserves an answer. So at the risk of giving StillSecure a shameless plug, let me give you the three foundations that we have built our products on that allow us to excel at interoperability:

1. Using open standard software and hardware - All StillSecure products run on off the shelf x86 hardware or in VMware virtual machines. Additionally, our products all run on top of the StillSecure OS which is a hardened and stripped version of Linux, but still provides that standard command line programs and interoperability that the Linux OS allows. Additionally, we use standard and open databases such as MySQL and PostgresSQL that are SQL and ODBC compliant. Additionally, we have open data base schema's. Also, we use Java webservers and similar types of open standard software that makes it easier for us to work with other products and for our customers to feel comfortable with what is under the hood.

2. Support of industry frameworks and standards - Whether it be TCG/TNC or NAP in the NAC world or CVE and FDCC in vulnerability management, we support industry wide standards and frameworks which allow products to work with each other. SNMP traps, SMTP email alerts are all standard in StillSecure products.

3. Enterprise Integration Frameworks- StillSecure products all ship with our enterprise integration frameworks. These are a complete set of fully documented and functional APIs in XML and Java that allow for the bi-directional exchange of data with many 3rd party products. This is perhaps our greatest means of interoperabitility and integration.

Dave, I hope that answered the question for you. Now that we know about the blog, we will be reading. Good Luck!