Does the market want dedicated appliances?

As I have written before, StillSecure released a free version of our Strata Guard IDS/IPS back in January.  The response to this free version of Strata Guard has been pretty impressive, with hundreds if not thousands of downloads.  Like all versions of Strata Guard, SG Free can be downloaded as an ISO image and loaded on a standard x86 machine.  It installs the OS, database, application and turns the box it is loaded on into a dedicated appliance.  From a security point of view, we have always considered it a security risk to have any other applications running on this "dedicated appliance".  Based on some great customer research done by Mitchell Ashley's CE team, we determined that at least for the free version, people would like to run SG on a shared box.  So, our development team led by Brad Doctor put some time into developing  a version of Strata Guard to run in a virtual machine in VMware.

We released SG Free that can run in a VMware Virtual Appliance for Linux this past week. The folks at VMware were very helpful in making this work and then joined with us in the release.  They also posted on their blog about it and several news services picked up and ran with the story. The response has been phenomenal!  Over the past few days, we may have in fact doubled the amount of downloads and users of SG  Free.  To me, this says loud and clear that at least for the freeware version of our product (which at least in theory, is aimed at smaller users), people want to run IDS/IPS on a shared box.  Maybe because most people downloading SG Free are at first evaluating it and therefore do not want to have to dedicate a box to it, is one reason.  Maybe there are other reasons I am missing, but the results speak for themselves. 

It also speaks volumes about the popularity of virtual machines and the appeal of VMware.  I know Martin McKeay ran an article about it a few weeks ago.  I for one never realized what a huge community of users exists for virtual machine applications.   By the way if you are interested, you can download SG Free at http://www.stillsecure.org