Dell splashes cash on SonicWall's powerful firewall erections John Swainson, president of Dell Software, took control of the giant's nascent software business last week and has moved fast, using the Dell checkbook to snap up SonicWall – a firewall and threat-management software and appliance maker – for an undisclosed sum. SonicWall, which was founded in 1991 by brothers Sreekanth and …
I hope they don't take the same half-assed approach to this as they did with KACE. KACE is quite a nice product and fits well with Dell's hardware offerings, but the big letdown is that KACE still don't have proper support for RHEL6 - despite that being *the only flavour of RHEL* that Dell have sold for over a year now. Similarly they still don't have support for Lion - yeah, the client seems to work, but if I wanted something with no official support from our vendor I'd have gone with something open-source and free, not something %^&*ing expensive.
Dell's actions in snapping up other companies have me slightly unnerved, in that they suggest that rather than trying to do enterprise hardware & support properly, Dell are keen to start doing a lot more things in a half-assed fashion...
Recently installed a Sonicwall VPN device for a client, first product from them I've recommended in years.
I wonder what Dell will do with them - keep the branding or rename it Dell, remove product lines, maintain or remove support for legacy products, etc.
I've not been particularly impressed with Dell's networking products in the past. Have no idea about their support, but if it's anything like what used to drive me nuts with their PC support (treating you like garbage unless you claim to be a Fortune 500 corporation or something), I'm not looking forward to this.
Its obviously a grow by pieces strategy rather than a big bang approach. The key points will be converging the product lines into something coherent. Not sure if dell have a great record of that.
It smacks of a toe in the water exercise with no real confidence to make a decent sized purchase.
I was really tired of SonicWall's quirky VPN, admittedly buggy SIP (what decent company fails to address a known issue with something like basic SIP NATing for almost a year?), and abysmal Wireless performance. However, I was feeling too lazy to go through the trouble to set up something decent. Now I hear Dell is getting involved. I'm DEFINITELY not paying good money to "renew" our license to download the latest firmware when they expire later this year.
Full disclosure: as a former Austinite I am inclined to view anything from Dell as carrying the touch of death.
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