Re: VelociRaptor: Still viable

["Patrick M. Hausen" <hausen () punkt de>]

Hi all!

Mike wrote:

> Besides the truly geeky open source solutions, Raptor has historically been 
> my favorite firewall.  It's been a year since I've had direct admin work w/ 
> it though, so with merger and purchase fever I don't know what it's status is.
>
> Does anyone know what the plan is?  Will it be around?  Is the support any 
> good?  Are new features being worked on or is it coasting?

Being a long time Gauntlet reseller we finally decided to jump ship.
Technical merits aside the communication skills of the Secure
Computing people seem to be of the same quality or worse than those
of NAI. A couple of months after the announcement of the acquisition
of the Gauntlet product line by Secure Computing, they are still
not able to tell me what they have in mind about the future of
the product.

Seemingly software manufacturers don't grasp that small to medium
sized businesses plan investments in periods of 5 to 10 years,
even or especially for IT stuff. Most of my customers still run
Windows 95 or whatever came with the 5 year old PCs some of their
employees still use - they won't upgrade just becaus MS tells them to.

To get a little bit more on-topic: actively seeking a replacement
for the Gauntlet software we sold, but a replacement which would run
on the Sun/Sparc systems the customers had bought to run their
firewall, it seems like Raptor is still a very good bet.
Finding a software solution that would run on Solaris from
a manufacturer that had an active partner/reseller program was
#1 on the checklist. Proxy based architecture came second.

Firewall-1 was considered a "if it can't be avoided" solution
that would at least protect hardware investments while it would have
forced us to invent some really clever rethoric explaining why
over all these years we bashed stateful inspection and suddenly
changed our minds ... :-/

The Axent/Raptor product line was bought by Symantec quite a
while ago and from what they showed us so far everything looks
quite good. Active development of the Solaris version (well,
NAI did that, too, but SC can't tell me if they will), good
partner program, ... the partner manager for our region is
able to actually _communicate_ ;-)

Now if the product stands up to the promises, well ... I just got
my evaluation copies of Symantec Enterprise Firewall (as it is
called now) - if you are interested, I'll let you know the
results. For now it seems like we will try and get every customer
currently running Gauntlet to switch to "Raptor" once their
contracts expire.

Not to forget: the pricing model is very reasonable. Licenses
are "perpetual" as opposed to NAI's "2 years right to use".
Security patches for maintained products are for free. Product
upgrades require either a support contract or a fresh buy.
At least this way the customer has got a _choice_, though
I'd always recommend a support contract for a firewall.
NAI's time limited licenses always looked kind of artificial to me.
Call it "enforced support contract" or whatever.

Regards,
Patrick M. Hausen
Technical Director
-- 
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