Sourcefire Partners Cite Next-Generation IPS, Next Generation Firewall & Virtualization As Competitive Advantages for 2011
Special to TAG-IT News Agency
COLUMBIA, MD - Sourcefire Inc., the creator of Snort and a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions, today announced the completion of two fourth quarter Global Partner Advisory Council meetings in Las Vegas and Lisbon. The company launched the Partner Advisory Council forums to reiterate its commitment to the channel and provide detailed insights and elicit feedback on its product strategy, direction, and channel program and incentives.
The strategic forum gathered channel partners from around the world and provided input on channel requirements, market trends and customer needs for the next 12 months. Conducted soon after Sourcefire's Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS) and Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) announcement in October, the Advisory Council focused heavily on Sourcefire's technology leadership and direction.
Partners provided input and validated Sourcefire's approach to NGIPS and NGFW and indicated that the network context and application visibility and control delivered by Sourcefire Real-time Network Awareness (RNA) and Real-time User Awareness (RUA) offer substantial advantages to their customers. Partners also stated that Sourcefire's best-in-class technologies are addressing customers top priorities for 2011 and beyond.
By integrating application control and network context into its Next-Generation IPS, Sourcefire is providing Avnet's channel partners with a competitive advantage, protecting end user customers against threats posing the most risk to their networks, said Bruce Hockin, head of Business Strategy, Avnet Technology Solutions. Through the Global Partner Advisory Council meetings, Sourcefire is illustrating its commitment to the channel, while also allowing partners to provide meaningful input on the direction of its channel program and product offerings.
Virtualisation was also a primary topic at the meetings with partners anticipating increased adoption in 2011. As deployments grow, partners are expecting security requirements to quickly follow, and Sourcefire was lauded for its virtual security offerings. According to Jeff Laurinaitis, Sales Director at RKON, Sourcefire's ability to correlate security events to a user ID is becoming critical as we see the enterprise space migrating the rest of their production servers to a virtual infrastructure as well as ubiquitous interest and large projects in virtual desktops. Sourcefire is allowing our customers to easily monitor virtual machines to verify that their users are secure and adhering to policies.
Responding to Sourcefire's recent statement that the company will only move forward on subscription pricing for its virtual appliances, Gordon Shevlin, EVP Vendor Relations and Business Development at FishNet Security, Inc. stated: We are pleased that Sourcefire has adjusted its subscription pricing model to only focus on its virtual solutions. This change in course is yet another example of Sourcefire listening to its partners and delivering the solutions and packages customers need and want.
Sourcefire NGIPS increases the power of traditional IPS solutions by providing contextual awareness to accurately identify real threats, an open architecture to enable customisation and intelligent automation for impact assessment and IPS tuning. Building upon its technology leadership in NGIPS and contextual awareness technologies, Sourcefire plans to expand its security portfolio to include NGFW in the second half of 2011. The company's NGFW will deliver enhanced application identification and control providing more protection through application policy management.
"Sourcefire is at the forefront of the intrusion detection and prevention market and, as such, is well positioned to deliver a leading Next-Generation Firewall," said Andrew Hay, senior security analyst at The 451 Group.
"Sourcefire's work in building application awareness into its IPS is a logical springboard from which to launch a Next-Generation Firewall."
The goal of these regularly scheduled Global Partner Advisory Council meetings is to gain partner input into Sourcefire's product and channel strategies, said Chris Peterson, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels, Services and Support at Sourcefire. Based on the input of this quarter's meetings, we will be refining our programs to yield even greater partner synergy and success.
