Given that you're selling smart switches and there's lots of switch vendors and lots of NAC products that don't involve switches, how do you convince people to buy your switches?

There's always the nobody-ever-lost-their-job-by-picking-Cisco group. We won't be targeting that group. There's a large market that doesn't necessarily like the incumbent switch suppliers. We think there is a better solution here, which is NAC integrated with switching. We think customers that are interested in controlling their networks will care a lot about that. There is a market for us running around the legs of the elephant. There's a number of people who are early adopters of the technology, and want to be on the leading edge of what these things can do. We have a technically superior solution.

The second piece is that we've been able to win straight-up on switching business against Cisco. We can compete head-to-head. I'll be frank with you -- it's hard to do that, given Cisco's dominance. But we'll carve our own niche here.

Does ConSentry have enough financial resources?

We have solid backing from the existing investors. One of the things that's good about this is, we're going to be fine. I don't have the immediate mandate to go out and beat the streets for money.

Do you have plans for investing in more personnel?

Yes. As we line up on this market space, we have to expand our sales and marketing. It won't all be direct. It will be a lot of partners, value-added resellers, and hopefully some of our competitors will push our products, too.

What would be a scenario where a competitor would want to push your gear?

For example, if they are already a switch vendor, and they don't have Layer 7 capabilities and can't offer these types of solutions -- we're a natural OEM partner. A lot of people have used other companies to get their market extended.

What do you see NAC technology looking like in a couple of years?

First and foremost, we think it's heading toward the networking layer. We think switching is where this goes. Very much the same way that virtualization is taking over individual applications on individual servers and consolidating them into a single piece of hardware, we think many of these single applications will consolidate into a role-based policy engine that basically has security as an automatic function.

Where do you see other NAC start-ups being in a few years? Is there room for everybody?

Probably not. We believe if you don't go down the switching path, that there won't be room for NAC as an individual appliance. That's why we did it.