Is Bob Gleichauf On His Way Out At CSCO?

Thomas Ptacek | February 23rd, 2007 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry, Uncategorized

I’m just asking. Two weeks ago, Cisco “Security CTO” and ex-Wheel Group exec Bob Gleichauf told Paul Roberts at NetworkWorld, regarding their NAC endpoint plans:

CTA will be something that’s open source. That’s just logically where it should end up […] We don’t want to be in the CTA business, so we’re going to just open it up.”

(CTA is Cisco Trust Agent, a small endpoint agent that “certifies” hosts for admission into a NAC regime in Cisco’s NAC scheme).

Now this week, we get:

“Cisco is not open-sourcing CTA,” said a Cisco spokesperson this week. “Cisco is taking a different approach to being open via standards” regarding NAC.

Note the wording; “a Cisco spokesperson”, not Gleichauf, directly contradicting a major announcement made at RSA. What’s going on here? Can I be conspiracy-theoretic for a bit? Who’s calling the shots over there? The whole system’s out of order!

2 Comments so far

  • alan shimel

    February 23rd, 2007 8:00 am

    Thomas- I wrote about this when the article with Bob G first came out and then when they changed the story. At first I thought the same thing. But if you look most of the stories about Bob saying this are from the one interview he did. It could be he was talking about Cisco’s intention to one day turn this over and the reporter misunderstood. Would not be the first time it happened. Anyway, I wrote more about it at my blog http://www.stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com/ashimmy/2007/02/sometimes_peopl.html

  • paul roberts

    February 23rd, 2007 10:51 am

    Interesting, but I’d say you’re inferring a bit much Cisco’s use of a spokesperson. Gleichauf is “out” at Cisco — as in “out on vacation” this week, which is why he wasn’t available to clarify for the NWW story.

    Fortunately, I spoke to him on Friday, prior to his leaving, and got it straight from the horse’s mouth. You can read about it here:
    http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/21/HNcisconac_1.html?source=searchresult

    From the InfoWorld article: “Where I misspoke was speaking in terms of CTA going open source as if that’s a given, and that was incorrect. That was my mistake,” Gleichauf told InfoWorld last week. “It has been part of a discussion of a number of different options available to us, but it’s not a viable option at this time,” he said.

    A more circumspect Gleichauf said that in earlier comments he was just speculating that CTA might be turned into an open-source component. “Open source was one thing that’s a way of dealing with various components as work toward an integrated solution,” he noted “

    From what I can tell, Bob’s job is safe — though I think he had some ’splaining to do after the interview he gave me at RSA. My guess: even if Cisco was considering throwing CTA open source, there’s no way they’re going to do it anytime soon, given the blow up over this.

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