Why I Said No: Evaluating Network Security Vendors

I want to tell the Velio story one more time, not because I have told it often but because the decision at the heart of it is the most direct expression I can point to of how I think about commitment and accountability.

Vendor Evaluation Framework: Transactional vs. Accountable

How to Assess Enterprise Security Partners

The Velio Decision: Principled Integrity vs. Commercial Exit

In 2002, Velio was under significant pressure. The telecom bubble had collapsed after 9/11. The market for our crossconnect chips — the technology we had built to an order of magnitude better than any competitor — had evaporated. The company needed a path forward, and the most commercially obvious path was acquisition by Cisco.

Cisco made sense in many ways. They had the distribution channels, the sales organization, the customer relationships that would give our technology the market access it needed. A Cisco acquisition would have been defensible to every stakeholder.

I said no.

The reason was specific. I had given personal verbal commitments to Lucent, Tellabs, Ciena, Fujitsu, Marconi, and other telecommunications companies who had bet on Velio as a supplier. They had built product roadmaps around our chips. They had made commitments to their own customers that depended on our technology being available to them. A sale to Cisco — their direct competitor in several market segments — would have compromised their competitive position in ways they had never agreed to accept when they chose to bet on us.

These were not formal contractual obligations in most cases. They were the kind of commitments that business relationships depend on - the kind that, when broken, teach everyone in the ecosystem that commitments from this source are not reliable.

The board ultimately forced the issue. I resigned rather than execute a sale that would betray the customers who had trusted us. The company's assets were eventually sold to LSI and Rambus anyway. The outcome I was trying to prevent happened.

The Legacy of Integrity in Modern Cybersecurity

I do not tell this story to celebrate what happened - it was genuinely painful and the outcome was not the one I was working toward. I tell it because the conviction behind the decision is the conviction I carry into every customer relationship at Netenrich.

When a CISO chooses Netenrich over a better-recognized, better-capitalized alternative, they are making a bet that we will do what we say we will do:

• Our commitments to them are not contingent on commercial convenience.
• We will be here when the deployment is difficult, not just when it is smooth.
• We will treat their operational trust as the most critical asset extended to us.

That is not a marketing position. It is the direct descendant of a decision made in 2002 that cost me my company but preserved my integrity. Some things are worth more than the commercial exit.

Choose an Agentic SOC Partner You Can Trust

Transactional legacy vendors shouldn't dictate your operational roadmap. At Netenrich, our commitment to open architectures and total data transparency is built directly into our platform. Partner with us to deploy an Agentic SOC rooted in shared trust and uncompromising accountability.

*Part of my ongoing series on data science and the future of security operations.*

 
About the Author