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 E-Meeting
Appliances; Overcoming the Fear Factor!
In the past we have talked about one of the major trends we
have seen in collaboration over the last year is the ability of
vendors to drive collaborative functionality into the infrastructure.
NetScreen offers a great example of this in their new Secure Meeting
Series, which are a line of e-meeting appliances. I have interviewed
Andrew Harding Director, Marketing and Product Manager for this
new appliance line, and our wide-ranging discussion focused on everything
from RTC trends to sales and marketing strategies for this e-meeting
appliance… David Coleman
Coleman : Andrew, you evidently did a lot of research
on the RTC market before releasing this product, what trends and
directions did you find?
Harding : We saw in our research that people seek
to more broadly adopt RTC and e-meetings, but there are two big
barriers to adopting e-meeting as a cross-enterprise tool. What
we saw is that Sales and Marketing often used RTC, but it was ad-hoc
and pretty spotty usage—mostly services “provisioned” by a sales
executive with a corporate charge account. Or we saw internal use
of RTC technologies, where RTC was provisioned as a feature of the
messaging server but was limited to internal users. Even with this
spotty, ad-hoc usage, folks were seeing benefits. We wanted to help
extend these benefits to mobile and remote users, and to users that
might not be employees, such as partners and other business associates.
We all meet with lots of folks, not just our co-workers and we wanted
to make all these meetings secure and cost effective.
Those are the two barriers we identified, security and cost. The
increased risk of deploying a collaboration extranet using a software
toolkit and the loss of policy control that results from outsourcing
to a hosted service really exemplifies the security barrier we saw.
The high recurring costs of service-based RTC offerings are preventing
many users that have a clear need and would benefit from e-meeting.
This is the cost barrier that we found most often.
The Secure Meeting Appliance we just announced is really focused
on the type of meeting that has the great productivity benefit:
the external or cross-enterprise meeting. When attendees are working
beyond the perimeter firewall for a meeting you have a very heterogeneous
environment. Reconciling security policy, different network topologies,
operating systems, can prevent folks from initiating successful
e-meetings. You need to have them provisioned immediately while
applying a security policy that leverages existing AAA systems.
An appliance that increases security, reduces costs, deals with
the complexities of cross-enterprise environments, while addressing
the core needs of e-meeting attendees, we feel, fills a critical
need within the enterprise.
Coleman : What is an e-meeting appliance?
Harding : Secure Meeting Series, our e-meeting
appliance, is a hardened system for cross-enterprise collaboration.
It's a rack mounted server that enables you to simply and securely
deploy an e-meeting system. All you have to do is give it power,
a network connection and define a few settings to integrate with
your existing AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Auditing) policies.
The benefit of having a “hardened” system (where the OS components
such as the Web server, the network and file subsystems have been
written to be secure and have been audited by third parties) is
that you reduce your public facing risk profile while getting the
benefits of cross-enterprise meetings. Since it's a purpose built
system, not a general purpose OS on a general purpose server, it
has easy to use management features and high-availability features
(such as clustering) built in. This is really collaborative infrastructure;
you get the added benefits of high availability, no single point
of failure without the high recurring costs and loss of policy control
that come with a hosted service. You get the benefits of customer
premise equipment, but avoid the cost, risk, and complexity of a
collaboration software deployment.
Coleman : Why did you choose to implement e-meetings
in hardware, almost everyone else has done it in software?
Harding : Before we built the Secure Access SSL
VPN appliances, application-layer remote access was usually supported
with an extranet software deployment or, to a lesser degree, through
a hosted service. With the Secure Meeting appliances, enterprises
have a new option for user-to-user collaboration. They can purchase
CDs and general purpose servers or they can duplicate internal systems.
This involves significant hardware costs, and the deployment tasks,
including manually hardening farms of servers, are a huge undertaking.
Enterprises might try to deploy service-based functionality more
broadly, but the loss of policy control and high recurring costs
make that problematic in large scale use. Historically, Neoteris
was an appliance company, and the Neoteris IVE Platform seemed like
a natural alterative to designing and developing and deploying custom
software-based extranets. (Note: Neoteris was acquired by NetScreen
Technologies in November 2003, and NetScreen is being acquired by
Juniper Networks in April of 2004).
Coleman : There seems to be a tradeoff with this
first release of your product of security for functionality, can
you talk about your product roadmap for future releases?
Harding : Our product is not targeted to uses
like formal training or very large events. To be fair, we are really
targeting the most common form of meeting, what CS calls an "e-meeting"
which is small, highly interactive and secure. For example: the
project team meeting, partner meeting, review or authoring of specifications
with remote development teams, remote design,or tele-medicine. In
these applications the Secure Meeting appliance meets the security,
management and end-user functional needs.
Our product road map includes additional management, security,
and performance scalability features. I put a high priority on archiving
and auditing features, as well management features. Of course, our
customers have also helped us identify several important end-user
features, such as integration with portals and document management
systems, improvement to the file access features, and enhanced messaging
integration. We will probably partner with other collaboration vendors
over the next year to offer some of these end-user features.
Coleman : Who (what role) would you sell this
e-meeting appliance to in an organization? I would imagine IT? But
CS research shows that it is often the business units with a specific
need that are driving the adoption of these technologies, and that
IT is often a gatekeeper and implementer. Will you try to sell to
the BU's directly, and if so how?
Harding : Our partners/resellers sell our solutions
as an enterprise deployment. Being an enterprise sale it usually
bubbles up to the CIO/CSO (Chief Security Officer). It is true that
in the past we tended to deal with the security/networking people
in IT, rather than the VP sales, who might represent an important
user constituency. Fortunately for us, such executives are often
mobile and remote users. They're often users of the Secure Access
appliances, and when they hear that NetScreen is offering a dedicated
collaboration appliance that increases the security and reduces
the cost of another critical business, they usually stop and listen.
So we will still be selling to the same executives in the organization
as well as new folks. One important point is that we've given network
security experts a way solve the business problem, to say, “Yes”
to the VP of Sales, without increasing costs or reducing security.
We see this not only as an enterprise offering, but a way to effect
consolidation, where they may have a variety of RTC solutions now.
Some of our resellers sell solutions in security, networks or access
management. The most successful resellers sell a complete solution.
Coleman : So is this the first complete solution
that NetScreen has sold?
Harding : No, the Secure Access product family
is a complete solution for users connecting to resources or applications
safely from outside the firewall. The Secure Meeting appliances
focus on supporting secure user-to-user sessions.
Coleman : What do you see as the critical factors
for widespread adoption of RTC technologies in an organization?
Harding : As we discovered from our initial research
the critical factors for adoption are: the need to reduce or eliminate
recurring costs and increase security; simple management and deployment;
and the ability to instantly integrate with other AAA systems.
Coleman : In our research on e-meetings, they
have both presence and persistence. Do you have any plans to add
asynchronous collaboration functions to your product?
Harding : Yes, we can use our customizable UI
and other integration features to integrate with leading portals
(as we have with the Secure Access appliances) and we will be able
to add those features/functions through partners.
Coleman : How can you offer a hardware product
and still be cost competitive with software vendors with similar
functions? What is your pricing model for your e-meeting appliance?
Harding : If you look at the numbers for ROI,
purchasing a CD (software) and some general servers is much more
expensive than purchasing an e-meeting appliance. The custom systems
on general-purpose servers don't have the same security features
and require custom development to integrate them with the current
AAA infrastructure.
The Secure Meeting appliance cost starts at $14,995 for 50 concurrent
users. We don't license by named user, so our pricing is more like
a service (ASP) in pricing, you only pay for the active ports, and
in our case, you only pay for them once (except for support – ongoing
cost of 18%). There are folks spending $100/month of more per port.
And some enterprises are spending $10-15,000/month or more for a
hosted RTC service. With appliance infrastructure, they can get
about the same functionality and increase security while reducing
costs.
Coleman : Who is your target market for this appliance?
Is the product currently available? Is it sold directly by NetScreen,
or will it be sold by the Juniper Networks sales force once your
acquisition by them is complete in the next few weeks?
Harding : Our target market is the medium and
large enterprise, and we are focused on external, cross-enterprise
meetings. I think the term you use is “value network”--that network
of employees, consultants, partners, and customers that spans firewalls,
directories, and operating systems. Dispersed product development
teams. Experts in a medical field that are not on-site at the hospital.
These people need a secure solution for user-to-user sessions.
The Secure Meeting appliances are currently available and sold
entirely through the NetScreen Channel. The Juniper Networks acquisition
is not quite closed, so I cannot comment on that.
Andrew Harding, is the Director, Marketing, NetScreen Technologies,
Inc. He leads technical marketing for the Secure Access family and
product management for the Secure Meeting product family. He can
be reached directly at: aharding@netscreen.com
.
David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director
of Collaborative Strategies (CS) and the editor of " Inside
Collaboration " He can be reached by e-mail at davidc@collaborate.com
, or by telephone at 415/282-9197.
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