I wrote a post recently about ForeScout, a cyber security company. ForeScout was introducing a new offering, one which would cover the all-important Amazon public cloud. I pointed out that for a company that has been going for almost 20 years, I was surprised that AWS wasn’t already a “first-class citizen.” I also pointed out that, despite cyber security being typified as a boring industry, the news that ForeScout had secretly filed documentation for a public listing made it all the more interesting.

Someone within ForeScout seems to be hyper-sensitive about anything even remotely resembling criticism as they hit the roof suggesting my post was unfair! The decision was made to spike the story on my usual masthead, but I wanted to make a comment in here, where I have much more flexibility to opine.

Basically, ForeScout seemed to score themselves an own-goal. Not only did they fail to get the desired publicity for their AWS announcement, but they got a moderately influential analyst/commentator pissed off and focused not on what is good about their company and product, but what is bad about their ego-driven and defensive approach towards comms.

While the ForeScout product is what it is regardless of their approach towards communications and PR, in my experience, a professional operator can be expected to deliver from a product perspective as well as other areas. If ForeScout’s product is as poor as its comms seemingly is, I’d be worried…

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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