First it was Bradford Networks announcing they had raised another 8 million dollars in venture funding to help them break out beyond the edu market. Now comes word that Forescout has raised a like amount  amount of additional capital. This was based upon a 80% growth rate for Forescout.  This is well below the numbers I have seen Ray, Ken and Gordon throw about in interviews and at presentations.   I guess you can spin all you want about how many customers you have or have won, but when it comes to raising cash, you can't play as fast and loose as you do in your marketing.

Also this is a series E round for Forescout and brings their total raise to 44 million dollars.  That makes for a tough number to make work.  They need to roll some hard ways to make that bet pay off.  I was led to understand they just raised 6 million last September.  That makes 14 million in a little under a year.  Can you spell big B-U-R-N. 

The thing about both of these raises is that in the present market, just like the gas you put in your own tank, the gas these NAC vendors are putting in their tank is I am sure quite expensive!

• Almost 40% have not disclosed the number of records breached.
• Theft, either internal or external, have been the primary reason for the breach.

Tim Greene makes the point again in his column that NAC is a great tool to help with PCI compliance. He is right on. Here at StillSecure we have several customers who are using NAC to help with PCI.  My issue is Tim highlights some recent spin fed to him from the "used car salesman of NAC". They claim to have a "PCI kit" that will help with 8 out of 12 PCI requirments.  A kit sounds like something you put on your car to help with gas mileage or something and for all I know is just more snake oil.  They claim to have an "unnamed customer" who is already using it.  Who could that be, LVHH again?  Or maybe they found a Cisco or Juniper customer that they say uses them for NAC now too.  The BNBB advises to take anything they say or write with a grain of salt.  Remember Caveat Emptor!

Jardin notes that Virgin is thinking about what gets cached on planes. I would note that the idea of onboard media and caching servers is a great one, because it means that passengers could ostensibly stream or purchase downloadable digital content; and that whenever an airplane lands, its servers could automatically suck in at 802.11n speeds from a gate-mounted access point all the latest data to cache, including video.

On the cost of fuel to carry the Wi-Fi gear--probably a total of 200 pounds of dead weight and drag, based on information that Aircell and others have been giving out--I may have been close tot the mark when I suggested it was $50 for a cross country flight a few days ago.

The excellent Scott McCartney, author of The Middle Seat column in The Wall Street Journal, ran down the numbers on 10-June, and he says LAX-JFK costs about $500 per passenger when all the costs are figured out. But that includes all fuel divided by average passenger count: that is, the weight of the plane, everything in it, and its drag are all contributors.

That means that an added couple of passengers due to the availability of Wi-Fi; their willingness or the overall willingness to pay slightly more for the flight (which would be even fuller if more people want on); and the airlines' cut of a dozen or sessions per flight could clearly outweigh the gas cost.

Few occupations have such a low reputation as used car salespeople.  Well OK maybe lawyers ;-).  For the most part though used car sales people are not really as bad as they are made out to be or perhaps as bad as they used to be. Yes, there is the "what do I have to do to put you in this car today" attitude, but by and large - lemon laws, consumer protection rules and truth in advertising regs have taken some of the snake oil out of the fast and loose way of doing business which earned them their reputation.  Who doesn't hear or read an ad today for cars without the "fine print" being mentioned.

In the world of NAC though we have no such protections built in it seems. It is very much "caveat emptor" - buyer beware.  NAC companies can pretty much say what they want, claim what they will.  How is a prospective customer supposed to know the truth?  Some say you can check references, but even then much like someone applying for a job, do they ever give a reference who is not going say something nice about them? The easy answer of course is try it for yourself. There is no substitute for actually kicking the tires.

Here is another idea I was thinking about, I call it the Better NAC Business Bureau (BNBB).  Its mission is to shine a spotlight on some of the dark alleys and rat holes that some NAC vendors do business in.  The same way the used car salesmen of the world have been rehabilitated, lets do the same with NAC marketing! 

With that in mind, the first investigation of the BNBB is in regard to some recent press releases from two NAC vendors.  The first press release is from StillSecure and is in regard to Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Center.  It claims that LVHHC is and has been a NAC customer of StillSecure for the past two years and continues to be a customer.  The press release has quotes from the CIO of LVHHC.  The second press release and case study is from NAC vendor X .  It also claims that LVHHC uses this companies product product for NAC throughout the entire organization.  They also have a quote from someone at the organization (OK, not the CIO, but someone).  Who to believe?  Does LVHHC have two NAC solutions?  I doubt it.  What to do? 

Well we can look at a little history.  For instance which of these two NAC companies claimed they did not use Nessus in their NAC product and than it turned out they did.  What company took the infamous TCP reset and tried to peddle it as a "virtual firewall".  Of course there was the time they took out Google ad words on my name. Yes my friends, it seems that playing fast and loose with marketing claims has earned this company a bit of a used car salesman reputation. But like gas mileage, past performance is not controlling and your performance may vary.

So lets give this company the benefit of the doubt. Maybe in their burning desire to show reference customers they were a little to quick to pull the trigger here.  Lets give them a chance to go back and check with their sources and see if they have the facts the straight.  If they find out that perhaps they were mistaken about this customer using their product for NAC for over 20,000 users at LVHHC, lets give them a chance to retract or correct the press release and case study.  At that the BNBB would close this file without any prejudice.  Case closed, the BNBB does its job again. What do you think would be a reasonable time to do this?  Two weeks? Three weeks? I'll tell you what, the BNBB is founded on fairness.  Lets give them a month. 

If after a month though they have not updated the case study and press release we will have a podcast here and we will delve into this further.  We are going to find out what the NAC solution there is.  Of course Forescout is invited to participate in the podcast and can even bring their own guests if they like.  But at the end of the day, there is only one solution being used for NAC at LVHHC and we all are going to find out what that is.  That hospital ain't big enough for the both of us!

If you would like to be involved in this podcast or the BNBB drop me a line at podcast@stillsecure.com

Few occupations have such a low reputation as used car salespeople.  Well OK maybe lawyers ;-).  For the most part though used car sales people are not really as bad as they are made out to be or perhaps as bad as they used to be. Yes, there is the "what do I have to do to put you in this car today" attitude, but by and large - lemon laws, consumer protection rules and truth in advertising regs have taken some of the snake oil out of the fast and loose way of doing business which earned them their reputation.  Who doesn't hear or read an ad today for cars without the "fine print" being mentioned.

In the world of NAC though we have no such protections built in it seems. It is very much "caveat emptor" - buyer beware.  NAC companies can pretty much say what they want, claim what they will.  How is a prospective customer supposed to know the truth?  Some say you can check references, but even then much like someone applying for a job, do they ever give a reference who is not going say something nice about them? The easy answer of course is try it for yourself. There is no substitute for actually kicking the tires.

Here is another idea I was thinking about, I call it the Better NAC Business Bureau (BNBB).  Its mission is to shine a spotlight on some of the dark alleys and rat holes that some NAC vendors do business in.  The same way the used car salesmen of the world have been rehabilitated, lets do the same with NAC marketing! 

With that in mind, the first investigation of the BNBB is in regard to some recent press releases from two NAC vendors.  The first press release is from StillSecure and is in regard to Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Center.  It claims that LVHHC is and has been a NAC customer of StillSecure for the past two years and continues to be a customer.  The press release has quotes from the CIO of LVHHC.  The second press release and case study is from NAC vendor X .  It also claims that LVHHC uses this companies product product for NAC throughout the entire organization.  They also have a quote from someone at the organization (OK, not the CIO, but someone).  Who to believe?  Does LVHHC have two NAC solutions?  I doubt it.  What to do? 

Well we can look at a little history.  For instance which of these two NAC companies claimed they did not use Nessus in their NAC product and than it turned out they did.  What company took the infamous TCP reset and tried to peddle it as a "virtual firewall".  Of course there was the time they took out Google ad words on my name. Yes my friends, it seems that playing fast and loose with marketing claims has earned this company a bit of a used car salesman reputation. But like gas mileage, past performance is not controlling and your performance may vary.

So lets give this company the benefit of the doubt. Maybe in their burning desire to show reference customers they were a little to quick to pull the trigger here.  Lets give them a chance to go back and check with their sources and see if they have the facts the straight.  If they find out that perhaps they were mistaken about this customer using their product for NAC for over 20,000 users at LVHHC, lets give them a chance to retract or correct the press release and case study.  At that the BNBB would close this file without any prejudice.  Case closed, the BNBB does its job again. What do you think would be a reasonable time to do this?  Two weeks? Three weeks? I'll tell you what, the BNBB is founded on fairness.  Lets give them a month. 

If after a month though they have not updated the case study and press release we will have a podcast here and we will delve into this further.  We are going to find out what the NAC solution there is.  Of course Forescout is invited to participate in the podcast and can even bring their own guests if they like.  But at the end of the day, there is only one solution being used for NAC at LVHHC and we all are going to find out what that is.  That hospital ain't big enough for the both of us!

If you would like to be involved in this podcast or the BNBB drop me a line at podcast@stillsecure.com

Its been a while now since word got out that Comcast for sure and possibly other large ISPs were filtering and throttling traffic to their customers. Now Steve Musil over on C/Net is reporting on a report in the Register that Google will be releasing tools that they have developed which will allow users to monitor and identify this type of filtering by your broadband carrier. I am far from a Google fan boy, but I have to give Google a pat on the back for this one. 

The ISPs have tried to stop the government from stepping in here and preventing them from limiting and filtering traffic like this. It is part of the whole net neutrality thing.  The ISPs response is the government doesn't have to step in, the market will take care of itself. Yeah, just like the oil companies say about the price of gas. 

Ultimately I think the ISPs know they are going to lose this fight. Their next play is to start charging you based upon how much bandwidth you use.  We have already seen the noise around that one. It reminds me of my web hosting days.  Some hosts charged you by the bandwidth you used per month. Others gave you unlimited bandwidth but put you on a crowded machine where you had to fight for CPU time and hooked that up to a small pipe that was saturated.  So you did not pay for extra bandwidth, but you couldn't use any either.  Bottom line after a long period of access being cheap and plentiful, the ISP game is back.  You can pay them now or pay them later, but you will pay them.

Its been a while now since word got out that Comcast for sure and possibly other large ISPs were filtering and throttling traffic to their customers. Now Steve Musil over on C/Net is reporting on a report in the Register that Google will be releasing tools that they have developed which will allow users to monitor and identify this type of filtering by your broadband carrier. I am far from a Google fan boy, but I have to give Google a pat on the back for this one. 

The ISPs have tried to stop the government from stepping in here and preventing them from limiting and filtering traffic like this. It is part of the whole net neutrality thing.  The ISPs response is the government doesn't have to step in, the market will take care of itself. Yeah, just like the oil companies say about the price of gas. 

Ultimately I think the ISPs know they are going to lose this fight. Their next play is to start charging you based upon how much bandwidth you use.  We have already seen the noise around that one. It reminds me of my web hosting days.  Some hosts charged you by the bandwidth you used per month. Others gave you unlimited bandwidth but put you on a crowded machine where you had to fight for CPU time and hooked that up to a small pipe that was saturated.  So you did not pay for extra bandwidth, but you couldn't use any either.  Bottom line after a long period of access being cheap and plentiful, the ISP game is back.  You can pay them now or pay them later, but you will pay them.