Well I’ve been holding onto this news FOREVER and I”m glad I can finally talk about it. You may know that I’m happily employed at Q1 Labs Inc at the Integration Services Program Manager. You may also have seen the press releases recently about Juniper and Nortel partnering with Q1 Labs to sell a best in breed SIEM solution to compete with Cisco MARS but you may not know all the details. Basically what this boils down to is a good old fashioned handicap match like in wrestling 🙂

A great article by Sean Michael Kerner at the InternetNews site explains some of those details.

Juniper comments of note from the article:

Juniper Networks has utilized the QRadar technology inside of its new Security Threat Response Manager (STRM) solution, which is being announced this week. Sanjay Kapoor, director of product management at Juniper explained that STRM provides correlation rules to help IT to understand the millions of events that can occur across and network and boil them down to actionable items.

Kapoor noted that network administrators using STRM’s advanced event correlation engine could more easily identify which assets were attacked as well as what should be done to mitigate the attack.

Juniper doesn’t just take Q1 Labs solution and use it ‘as is’ rather Kapoor noted that Juniper uses it as framework that is then further customized with the benefit of Juniper’s security expertise.

“We wanted to have a strong response to Cisco MARS and this product is very competitive,” Kapoor said.

Nortel comments of note from the article:

Nortel Networks also uses Q1 Labs technology as part of an OEM partnership deal. The fact that Juniper is also a Q1 Labs partner is not a problem for Nortel.

“This is not a problem for Nortel. On the contrary, this validates our choice of technology and choice of partner,” Shmulik Nehama, director of business development and strategic alliances at Nortel told InternetNews.com.

“We have thoroughly evaluated the QRadar technology and have great appreciation to its security management capabilities. Customers are looking for solutions and QRadar is an important building block of our security solutions,” said Nehama.

Nehama added that QRadar is an important component of Nortel’s solution offering for closed-loop security management and compliance. As such it is part of Nortel’s go to market strategy and is expected to remain as such in the foreseeable future.

Don’t count out Enterasys Networks either. They’ve been a ‘Powered by Q1 Labs’ partner for quite a while as outlined in this past press release.

Enterasys comments of note from the article:

“We are proud to be the first ‘Powered by Q1 Labs’ partner and have been very pleased with the growth of our Dragon Security Command Console (DSCC) business and multi-year engineering collaboration,” said Mike Fabiaschi, CEO of Enterasys. “Our partnership with Q1 Labs and resulting unique integration with DSCC has enabled Enterasys to enhance our Secure Networks(TM) architecture with multi-vendor log management, network behavioral analysis, and security information management capabilities. What this means for our customers is a practical, achievable way to efficiently and effectively sense and automatically respond to security incidents when DSCC is deployed in conjunction with Enterasys Dragon(R) and NetSight(R) network security management software.”

Let the games begin 🙂