CRN Interview: Chuck Boesenberg, NETIQ

NetIQ is aggressively growing its portfolio, bolstered by its, acquisitions last year of Marshal Software and PentaSafe Security Technologies. Editor Heather Clancy recently spoke with NetIQ CEO, President and Chairman Chuck Boesenberg about his company's priorities in the security marketplace.

CRN: How did your security acquisitions change the complexion of your channel, if at all? Did you acquire any channels through those acquisitions?

BOESENBERG: In one of the acquisitions, Marshal Antispam, which is content security/spam management, sold 100 percent through the channel and through the volume distribution channel. And we were really happy. When we were analyzing buying them, one of the values we thought we were getting was improved access to the distribution channel. That allowed us to take our products and then have a nice suite of products that that channel would use.

The second acquisition was Pentasafe, and Pentasafe was more [involved with] the systems integrator channel. It was security management and security-policy management and that was the type of activity the integrators were doing.

So, in both of those cases, as we went through the checklist, their positions in the channel were very important to us.

CRN: Can you be more explicit about the things that your console does?

BOESENBERG: Think of it this way. Here is your application that runs throughout your enterprise. There is actually an agent that literally goes out on the network and monitors activities, brings that activity in, diagnostics are done, and then we create management reports so that the customer can understand what's happened on their e-mail network the last few days or last night; what's been the availability; and where have they had a security breach. And then finally we give that customer a proactive direction about what they can do to better manage it. So, we monitor the application, do diagnostics, create management reports and then give them direction on being proactive to fix [vulnerabilities].

CRN: Given that there has been a stand-alone systems management market in the past, do the customers themselves understand that this is converging?

BOESENBERG: It gives us two sets of competitors in that you have the security companies, who are putting management capabilities on top of their products and now are trying to develop applications where they help customers manage competitors' products. And then you have the systems management vendors who are doing the same thing for their infrastructures or their applications. We are one, and Computer Associates is a second one, that has truly added a capability to provide both a systems and security management capability.

Here's where it stands today. One is that the various industry experts have said this is converging. Second is if we take our 3,000 enterprise customers, we're finding that customers who used to be security management customers are becoming systems management customers, and vice versa. And third %85 from a customer organization standpoint, more and more organizations are worrying about security management [as well as] systems management. ...

Performance, availability and security,I'd want to know about all three [on my network].