How It All Started

 I started Farallon Technology back in 2004 as the industry was emerging from the dotcom bust. I had been working for Internap, an Internet Services Provider (ISP) that had this fantastic new way of accelerating the Internet. There were many hardware, software and network-based solutions to accelerate Internet perfomance back then. Let’s talk a walk down memory lane. Do you remember:

Actona (Cisco), Akamai, Blue Coat, Cisco, Digital Fountain, DiskSites, Exinda, Expand Networks, Extreme, Fineground Networks, F5, Foundry, Internap, Ipanema, Netli, Netscaler, Nortel, Packeteer, Peribit, Radware, Redline Networks, Riverbed, RouteScience, Swan Labs, Speedera, Tacit Networks, UltraDNS…and the list went on.

The problem at the time was that IT buyers were totally confused with the vendor offerings. Which one solves my problem? How do I integrate it? What are the risks? And the vendors were so different from eachother when you got down what they provided.

 

Early Channel for Crossing the Chasm

So, I started Farallon (way back in the way back when) to help make sense of it all by simplifying a complex field (network acceleration) and helping companies to understand their business challenges from the network’s perspective and mapping that to the technologies that could address their problem from an application or network protocol level. I became an “early channel” to help new technology vendors, like Riverbed and Peribit (acquired by Juniper), to “Cross the Chasm” and help enterprise companies acquire the right solutions faster.

 

Today’s Technology Overload

Fast forward to today. Since the early days of the Internet, we’ve introduced a ton of new technologies that we couldn’t even dream of back in 2004 – virtualization, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, embedded M2M, IoT, cloud native, cybersecurity, and autonomous systems. It’s no surprise that IT research firms have had to expand their coverage across so many different sectors that research quality has suffered.

The problem is that companies still struggle with understanding which technologies to use. For super-complex sectors like embedded systems and cybersecurity, the challenges are profound, and IT research firms don’t seem to be cutting it.

 

Technology Research Is “Generic” – Ouch!

The biggest term I hear nowadays is that technology research reports are “generic.” They don’t provide the insight and punch that the actual users of the technology require. As a result, technologists have to spend countless hours researching new vendors and technologies on their own.

As a marketing leader and CMO for five different tech companies (Yipes, Reliance Globalcom, OpSource, Dimension Data, 365 Data Centers, and Mocana) I have become frustrated with the lack of detailed, technical, and thorough research on vendors in key technology categories. The Burton Group used to provide high quality research; however, they’ve been absorbed in the larger Gartner machinery. Gartner, IDC, and Forrester are great companies; however, when you get into the weeds of certain technologies, like embedded and edge cybersecurity, there is no way they can stay on top of it all at the level of detail that their increasing technical customers require.

How many times has your company paid an expensive annual subscription (tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars) for IT research that you didn’t really use?

 

A Better Way to Understand Technology and Markets

So, Farallon offers a better way to help you understand technologies and speed up your ability to determine which vendors might be the right ones to focus on to solve your problem.

We focus on embedded and edge cybersecurity, some of the most complex and important technologies when it comes to making products safe and reliable.

Our research focuses on understanding a vendor’s capabilities across a broad set of technical factors, typical use cases, and how you implement, manage and support the product (or service). It’s a simple approach that will allow you to understand how this product will help you to secure your device itself, data, applications, and communications.

 

Innovation: More for Less

Innovation is never about providing more for more. It’s about providing a better solution in a more cost effective way. That’s innovation that companies can use.

At Farallon, we want to make sure that our research and advisory services gets into the hands of the actual users of the technology. So, we’re making it simple and affordable to purchase great research. Our research is designed for the product managers, architects, developers, systems engineers, and financial analysts that want to dive into the details of technologies without spending hundreds of hours researching it themselves.

 

Join Us

 So, if you’re interested in a better way to understand technologies, markets and solutions, join us. If you’re a vendor, help to educate us on your solutions.

If you’re a technologist that craves more information on embedded and edge cybersecurity, let us know how you feel by commenting on this blog, contacting us or taking our survey. If there are other sectors that you think could benefit from more detailed, technical research, let us know. And off we go…