Rational Survivability

The drama continues?

Mitchell blogged last week about the release of the new eEye Preview Service, a "three-tiered security
intelligence program" from eEye and what he describes as an apparent change in focus for the company. 

With Ross Brown’s departure (and subsequent blog p0wnership) and Mitchell’s interesting observation of what appears to be a company migrating away from a product to a service orientation with continued focus on research, my eyebrows (sorry) raised today when I perused one of my syndicated intelligence gathering sites (OK, it’s a rumor mill, but it’s surprisingly reliable) and found this entry:

Is the end in sight for eEye?
Rumor has it more layoffs went down at eEye
this week. Rumor has it the company fired most of their senior
developers, most of the QA staff and demoted their VP of Engineering.
When: 6/8/2007
Company: eEye Digital Security
Severity: 70
Points: 170

Look, this is from f’d Company, so before we start singing hymnals, let’s take a breath and digest a few notes.

This was posted on the 8th. I can’t reasonably tell whether or not this round of RIF is the same to which the InfoSecSellout(s) [they appear to have admitted — accidentally or not — in a post to be plural] referred to on their blog.  I’d hate not to reference them as even a potential source, lest I be skewered in the court of Blogdom…

This appears to be the second round of layoff’s in the last few months or so for eEye and it indicates interesting changes in the VA landscape as well the overall move to SaaS (Security as a Service) for those companies who are looking for differentiation in a crowded room.

Of course, this could also be a realignment of the organization to focus on the new service offerings, so please take the prescribed dose of NaCl with all of this.  We all know how accurate the Internet is…It would be interesting to reconcile this against any substantiated confirmations of this activity.

I hate to see any company thrash.  If the rumors are true, I wish anyone that might have been let go a soft landing and a quick recovery.

This story leads into a forthcoming post on SaaS (Security as a Service.)

/Hoff