Network-access-control start-up ConSentry Networks has filled its long-vacant CEO position with Joe Golden, a partner in Accel Partners, a ConSentry investor. Golden was a partner in Accel Partners' London venture-capital office from 2001 until ConSentry hired him; before that he was Cisco's managing director of business development and strategic alliances for Europe, Middle East and Africa. With NAC in flux and with some start-ups having failed, Golden spoke with Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about ConSentry, its strategy and the future of NAC.

Why would you leave Accel for a start-up?

I love start-ups, I love the teamwork. Frankly, venture capital is not a team sport. It's more like a bunch of silos. I fell in love with NAC technology and where this market is starting to head.

What's particularly appealing about ConSentry?

We're one of the leaders at getting the access-control space going, and we think there's a heck of an opportunity here to integrate that with switching. It's taken them a while, but now Cisco and Juniper Networks are making noises about intelligent switching. We think that's good.

How would you describe the intelligent switching competition out there right now?

It's a very nascent market. There's a lot of Powerpoint and waving about intelligent switching. One way or another, we've been talking about Layer 7 switching and intelligence for the last 10 years; but when it comes to what's actually integrated and doing that, it's very little. The recent moves by Cisco and Juniper do endorse that space, and that is good for us.

What are the best things about ConSentry to exploit short-term?

We have a strong customer base using our boxes in different ways. We're a small start-up; we don't have a tremendous amount of resources; and we're going to focus in on a few market segments as a way to building our credibility, not just in market segments but in particular solutions.

What do you have planned to attract more customers?

One thing I want to point at is opening an API into our box and starting a third-party software development community around this. There's a huge number of things you can do in control- and role-based policy management. To think that we could sit down and write all the software for that would be crazy. But it's also a heck of an opportunity for customers. The product could be optimized for different customers in different market segments if we did open that API. I think it could be huge for the channel.

Can you give an example of how a third party might make use of the API?

Compliance. There's been an awful lot of hype about compliance [the Sarbanes-Oxley Act] in the United States and there are a tremendous amount of companies building software solutions for this. Very few of them have a hook to the networking layer to collect or report that information and, more importantly, control it. To bite off all the software that goes into compliance would be kind of silly. What we would want to do is provide the hooks for other people's software to run those complete solutions.

Given that you're selling smart switches and there's lots of switch vendors and lots of NAC products that don't involve switches, how do you convince people to buy your switches?

There's always the nobody-ever-lost-their-job-by-picking-Cisco group. We won't be targeting that group. There's a large market that doesn't necessarily like the incumbent switch suppliers. We think there is a better solution here, which is NAC integrated with switching. We think customers that are interested in controlling their networks will care a lot about that. There is a market for us running around the legs of the elephant. There's a number of people who are early adopters of the technology, and want to be on the leading edge of what these things can do. We have a technically superior solution.
The second piece is that we've been able to win straight-up on switching business against Cisco. We can compete head-to-head. I'll be frank with you -- it's hard to do that, given Cisco's dominance. But we'll carve our own niche here.

Does ConSentry have enough financial resources?

We have solid backing from the existing investors. One of the things that's good about this is, we're going to be fine. I don't have the immediate mandate to go out and beat the streets for money.

Do you have plans for investing in more personnel?

Yes. As we line up on this market space, we have to expand our sales and marketing. It won't all be direct. It will be a lot of partners, value-added resellers, and hopefully some of our competitors will push our products, too.

What would be a scenario where a competitor would want to push your gear?

For example, if they are already a switch vendor, and they don't have Layer 7 capabilities and can't offer these types of solutions -- we're a natural OEM partner. A lot of people have used other companies to get their market extended.

What do you see NAC technology looking like in a couple of years?

First and foremost, we think it's heading toward the networking layer. We think switching is where this goes. Very much the same way that virtualization is taking over individual applications on individual servers and consolidating them into a single piece of hardware, we think many of these single applications will consolidate into a role-based policy engine that basically has security as an automatic function.

Where do you see other NAC start-ups being in a few years? Is there room for everybody?

Probably not. We believe if you don't go down the switching path, that there won't be room for NAC as an individual appliance. That's why we did it.