NAC Vendor Lockdown Networks Bites The Dust

"Due to overall economic trends and slower than predicted adoption of Network Access Control (NAC) technology, the company was unable to raise additional sufficient venture capital to continue," reads a notice on the company's homepage.

Once a high flying startup in the NAC space, Lockdown partnered with Microsoft as part of the software giant's Network Access Protection initiative, and Gordon Mangione, who headed up SQL Server and security duties at Microsoft before leaving in 2005, was a member of Lockdown's board of advisors. Last April, Lockdown achieved interoperability with Cisco's Network Admission Control program.

Lockdown puzzled some security industry experts by issuing several press releases touting record growth in sales and customer acquisition, an unusual tactic for a private company.

But the writing had been on the wall for Lockdown for months, and former CEO Brett Helsel on Monday was named Senior Vice President of Engineering at Isilon Systems, a Seattle-based storage vendor.

Lockdown, which was backed by Ignition Partners, Integral Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and Cargill Ventures, will retain some employees to oversee the shutdown of the company and listen to offers for its intellectual property assets, the company said in the closure notice.

The Lockdown closure marks the third significant NAC market casualty in the past year. Last March, Caymas Networks, one of the first certified members of Cisco's NAC program, closed shop after running out of funding. Last September, Vernier Networks changed its name to Autonomic Networks and shifted its focus from NAC to technology that learns, audits, and controls user access to sensitive data.