Cisco takes Protego and 3Com takes Tipping Point. You can be excused if you missed those headlines while Symantec was shelling out billions for Veritas and IBM was dumping its PC business across the ocean. I haven’t seen the numbers for the year, but from my observations, it has been a good year for startups like Protego and Tipping Point. Protego, a startup that developed a moderately priced end point security device and was founded by two former Cisco employees, was grabbed recently by Cisco. Cisco has been on a bit of an acquisition binge recently with security companies. It also recently purchased Perfigo and Twingo, two companies that offer network security components. Tipping Point, which develops intrusion prevention systems, was acquired by 3Com, which is looking to increase its presence as a network security provider. Both startups have their fans, but plenty of IT departments have a difficult time buying products from companies without a pedigree. With the imprimatur of Cisco or 3Com, the products can be approved with nary a signature. Not all startups have that problem. Take a look at Panasas, for instance. After three years in stealth mode, the company announced its product – a clustered storage system for Linux. It also announced the system already had a customer – the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The company says Los Alamos will use Panasas’ ActiveScale Cluster technology to build the single largest Linux storage deployment on record. It certainly is huge – the lab has installed 120 terabytes of Panasas’ storage system and has plans for up to 500 TB of storage over the next year. It helped that Panasas had $72 million in funding and a pedigreed roster of talent, including Garth Gibson, who helped pioneer RAID storage and network-attached storage, as chief technology officer. All these companies shared one attribute – they developed products that the market actually needed. It reminds me of one startup company from the early days of the Internet. The company had six figures of seed money and sought to find a market for skateboard products on the Internet. After two years of market research by the two founders, they came to the conclusion that the products they wanted to offer were already available for free. It must have been a nice two-year ride, but there was not much to show at the end of it, save for a nice anecdote for me. That does not seem to be the case with Tipping Point, Panasas and Protego – they built something someone, be it customers or other companies, needed. Technology Industry