Sometimes you run across a company that just deserves to be selected as an innova­tor. You look them over and won­der why you didn't pick up on them before. Mandiant is one of those companies. There is a reason, of course. Mandiant started as a services company providing forensics, litigation support and incident response. So if you were in the product purchasing mood, you would not have run across these folks.

ArcSight gets a lot of play among security experts in the security event management (SEM)/security information manager (SIM) game.

How do you differentiate a product that keeps getting mixed up with a commod­itized market, but really doesn't belong there? What differentiators do you look for that can keep you from being included in a herd where you don't belong?

I just love these folks. Take the best open source pen testing tool you can think of, put it on steroids, give it a user interface that makes it simple and fast to pen test in a production environ­ment without losing the granularity of manual testing if you need it, and you have Core Impact. Well, almost. Every year I say that I am going to find a better tool, and I actually do comb the market -- unsuccessfully.

When your price starts at $50,000 and you are unique in your marketplace, you'd better have a good product. For Mu Dynamics, that is just where the story starts. When I first met the Mu folks, they were Mu Security. A new name later, they still are the innovators they were a couple of years ago. My conversation with a Mu visionary was an eye-opener.