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Yes, We Lowered Our Prices on our Security Event Manager Appliances Part 3

Life – it’s all in the timing.

So what of the timing of this slashing? Well, that actually brings together 2 things that are happening simultaneously, one is SIEM, the other is ELF.

As part of the “we want alerting” conversations we’ve been having, we’ve noticed that there are just way too many definitions of the logging and alerting in the market place. Go and pull papers from Forester, Bloor, Butler, IDC, Securosis, and Gartner and you’ll find a slew of different definitions. Do a quick Google of SC Magazine, ZDNet, The Register, and the IT Pro and you’ll find even more. It seems nobody can actually agree on what is SIM and what is SEM. And then there’s a whole group of people bullying and force-fitting their vision of SIEM onto unwilling vendors. So let’s be really clear, using the “icing on the cake” allegory, we discounted the 10% icing, the SEM (correlated event management), but we did not discount the 80% cake (SIM – log management).

The SIEM market (SIM+SEM) is currently setting their prices based entirely on the icing and pulling the cake in for free. There are several reasons for this. The most obvious is that the icing is the attractive sexy attention getter – the one thing that the customer think they want. The cake on the other hand is doing all the heavy lifting, and truth be told, it’s satisfying your real needs.

What of the vendors charging a premium for the icing I hear you ask? Utter baloney. No they’re not; these vendors just claim they are to fool the customers into thinking they’re getting a good deal. We regularly hear of customer receiving 80% or 90% discounts off RRP. In fact, at a recent industry get-together, one vendor told me that they have a POLICY of automatically discounting 80% if a competitor is bidding, and that it “almost always” rises to 100%. To misquote:

“Price doesn’t matter to us because we know we’ll get the customer with upgrades, consultancy, installation services and maintenance.”

As it turns out, all those air-miles logged by our “executives in the trenches” were miles well spent, as they helped us to uncover a dirty secret – SEM represents more shelfware than any other software in IT security. And that sad fact sums up the state of our competitors’ SEM offerings: bloated software that doesn’t do what the customer needs, is almost impossible to install and costs way more than you imagined.

We want to change the game by offering real solutions, to real problems, at an appropriate price. And that brings us to ELF, which we’ll talk about next time. Stay tuned…

Posted May 21, 2010 in LogEd | Permalink

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