24 April 2008

Orchestria named king of the jungle

Eleanor Dallaway , reporting from Infosecurity Europe 2008

Orchestria was crowned king of the jungle by lions Ray Stanton, Colin Clark, Paul Simmonds and Tony Lock at the popular, interactive Infosecurity event, the ‘Lion’s Den’, 24 April.

Six brave vendors faced the sharp-tongued panel, with only two minutes to complete their sales pitch. Orchestria’s risk and information management product was initially dismissed by Colin Clark, who asked “Which spam filter have you re-packaged this time?”.

Pete Malcolm, presenting for Orchestria, got off to an unsteady start when reprimanded by Tony Lock for speaking over him. “I’m asking the questions and you’re answering them. Let’s get that right”. Tony Lock also implied that the Orchestria product would make life harder rather than easier. But Malcolm won over all of the lions, who unanimously voted for Orchestria, admitting that not only would the product not be a waste of resources, “but might even be of benefit”.

Others fared less well. Lumension, BehavioSec and BeCrypt were amongst the gladiators also subjecting themselves to the lions’ critique. Despite winning the majority’s vote when the audience were asked to asked to vote for which product they’d buy, Lumension representative received a verbal lashing from Ray Stanton, who took offence to the claim that their suite of products eliminated unknown threats. “Call me stupid,” said Stanton, “But unknown risk is unknown. How the hell can you manage the unknown?”

Colin Clark de-valued BeCrypt’s offering, asking “What f**king use is this anyway? What does this actually do? Is it the emperor’s new clothes?”. When told that BeCrypt work closely with Homeland security, Clark sarcastically retorted, “and they have a bloody great record of security”.  

Paul Simmonds described BehavioSec’s offering as “a product available to see how many users it can p*ss of”, while Colin Clark questioned the use of its behavioural analysis capabilities. “I’ve already got a device that doesn’t work properly when my behaviour has been bad – it’s called my missus”.

The event’s ‘Caesar’ or chairman Colonel John Doody crowned Orchestria winner, as Colin Clark concluded, “It’s fantastic that we’ve managed to get six guys with balls to sit here. Next year perhaps we could get six guys with brains too please”.

www.orchestria.com

News index