Can you explain the rational of Cisco acquiring IronPort?
TE: Cisco wants to go upstream. They have a lot of infrastructure equipment, and they are working on the self-defending network concepts. Part of that involves application traffic. The only space that is too big to tackle itself is the anti-spam problem. IronPort was one of the first to get into anti-spam, and they did a good job. It makes sense for Cisco to want to sell, through the existing channels, this type of product. SM: It is the anti-spam appliance which was the main driver for the acquisition, not email data security? TE: Definitely, they have never been that strong on email security. The space, however, is very busy. There are a lot of people looking at if from different angles. What you really want is a single suite of products which solves all of these problems at once. People today have to work with a number of different vendors to solve a bunch of different problems. These products never talk to each other, so there is an awful lot of manual work required. The right thin
