You’re so cool, clarencenetworks.com, you’re so cool…

Dave G. | April 11th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry

While trolling various security product websites, I noticed that several had issued press releases that: “Gartner Thinks We’re Cool”. This brings up an important question. What is the analytical process for determining whether or not a company is cool? Yet again, I call on the securitymetrics cabal to quantify another critical business metric. Unfortunately, from what I have read about cool, it appears that we will need to wear sunglasses in order to qualify for this prestigious title. Thanks to an anonymous source, we have received a copy of the quadrant chart used to categorize cool companies:

Cool Quadrant

Viewing 7 Comments

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    Foundstone gave a sales pitch at my former company.
    After they left, we agreed we couldn't budget them.
    "But hey, wasn't cool how they all wore black".
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    Fabulous quadrants, Sir.

    The metric you seek could either be how much coolness
    you can buy for $X or how many dollars are required
    for Y Cool-ocity. The normalization problem is, of
    course, hard as no one intuitively believes any analyst
    except when they say nice things about you (as a vendor)
    or when you are trying to defend a bad purchase ex post
    facto (as an end-user). While it may be true that
    no one was ever fired for buying IBM and/or Microsoft,
    is it true that no one was ever fired when the product
    bought had a four-star coolness ranking? It is,
    naturally, very difficult to resist being flattered by
    imitation, so if your idea is really and truly cool
    your dollar cost of having it called cool will be zero
    as the analyst folks know, if they know nothing else,
    that they must see where their people are going so that
    they may lead them. I say this having had Gartner
    declare on 9 October 2003 that monoculture was dangerous,
    for which I am provably still remembering to be grateful.
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    didn't their cool practice owner recently leave to join a vendor
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    ok, so what is this generalized obsession with metrics? As a biased party (my company is "cool" according to Gartner) I can only say that somethings are not measureable with metrics and are subjective: If you are in the infosec. industry you have your preferences, some things seem cool to you (like the SunOS div/0 bug or zaleski's stange attractors) and some things seem very uncool -erhm lame?- like XSS bugs but they're completly unrelated to their current market value or correctness

    I do not see any evident business or technological value in being 'cool', it's just something handy for a Wild on Defcon episode of E! and for us to joke about at the bar.
    And no, you can't buy your way to the coolness valhalla, that would be totally uncool
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    Heh. Just when I was planning on writing a report on you guys. Well not really I don't cover this space anymore.

    "Coolness" in my book is measured by companies that solve hard problems and have a balance sheet to prove it.
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    Abner:

    Indeed that is cool. Been too long, email me!
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    Irony: Every analyst who builds a list/quadrant/cycle that ranks or profiles companies inevitably creates an even larger list of antagonists... who either didn't get mentioned, don't understand the formula/ranking, despise any focus on early stage technology companies because of their own legacy, or simply don't like the idea of cool, or magic, or hype cycles or... etc.

    I've been at companies treated fairly and unfairly in such efforts; been left out and highlighted. I think its "cool" when analysts, bloggers etc come up with their own rankings and stand by them.

    Lets face it... the web is filled with overlapping yet contradictory vendor claims, confusion, promises etc... is it all bad that third parties step up and articulate what they think in a way that draws attention to emerging technologies?

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