Expectations & product failures

tate@ClearNetSec.com (Tate Hansen) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:54:00 -0700

Last week I attended presentations from the Americas Growth Capital Conference. Several of the presentations featured prominent CEO/CTOs in the security products game.

I connected with a view echoed by a panel discussing the difficulty of selling security point solutions.

They raised the issue of their desire to set their customers’ expectations that their products will fail. Catastrophic failures, they said, are rare events. Their products are designed to work most of the time, but they repeated the fact that it is too expensive to build products which escape all bad things.

To limit the embarrassment of a product failure, they work on educating their customers and suggesting to each to invest in a good incident response strategy. This keeps the prices competitive, establishes trust, helps to level expectations, and addresses product failures caused from rare events.

I don’t know how well they convey this when the goal is to sell, but I liked the message.

ClearNet Security: Tag point solutions

Expectations & product failures