TSC Trusted Advisors’ Blog

Chatting with the CTO of Intelliden

So I was talking with the CTO of Intelliden (www.intelliden.com), a guy named Glen Tindal. I spend a lot of time talking with folks trying to understand what’s keeping them up at night and what’s working in their environments. Sometimes, like this chat with Glen, it’s just about why things are still broken. So it was with some surprise that as I listened to Glen talk that I heard my very words about how the network and the endpoints need to work together instead of the present, almost adversarial, model of two technologies that happen to share the same network space. Our discussion got a bit more specific in that we discussed how the OS and the underlying network need to cooperate in a more seamless manner. In the interest of full disclosure, Intelliden has a product that combines information from network objects into a central management console. (No, TSC hasn’t tested it so I can’t comment on it but Glen seems like a sharp guy.) Glen asked me if I thought there was a company poised to take advantage of an integrated network/OS environment and never being at a loss for opinion, I told him. (If you’d like to know feel free to email me) He was surprised but he had formulated a similar answer – just with different players.

The bottom line was that we both agreed that a couple of major players are going to have to merge their solutions in ways that haven’t been done in the past. The one issue that I’m sure will pop up though is the specter of unfair competitive advantage. I suppose that there will always be folks that would rather have a hackable computer instead of a few monolithic technology companies.