Way back in the 2001-2002 time frame, I was spending a great deal of my time explaining the proper design and deployment of extranets to hospitals all across North America.  At that time I worked for McKesson–a very large healthcare company–where one of my primary responsibilities was developing security solutions that would line up directly with the needs of healthcare customers, mostly centered around McKesson applications.  And of course this brought many design challenges that had to be painfully shared with customers, including the capex and opex that goes along with building and maintaining a truly secure extranet.  Not surprisingly, customers often just punched holes in firewalls and let things through.  I even had one customer tell me that they really wanted a secure extranet, but because they were part of the state university system and took money from taxpayers, they could not filter the traffic in any way.  Yeah, it was that scary.

After a few years of doing the same thing over and over and achieving the same less-than-desired results with so many customers (the definition of insanity), I wrote a white paper that was published by the SANS Institute, essentially detailing the optimal healthcare extranet.  Little did I know, that paper would soon change my life.

In early 2002 I received a call from the Nortel sales representative for Nortel–a sharp and very professional guy that had been joined to McKesson for years, his primary goal was to make sure that Juniper resold Nortel gear whenever possible.  Anyway, someone else inside Nortel had found my white paper, forwarded it to this guy, and asked him to get me on a call to discuss what Nortel could offer to fulfill this solution.  So, a few days later I am sitting in a meeting at the Nortel building and they immediately start talking to me about what would eventually become their SSL VPN.  I was intrugued and quite pleased, because they were basically envisioning a product that would achieve the goals that I had set to accomplish in the content of my paper.  A few months passed, and I had the first ever Nortel SSL VPN (that was shipped to a partner) sitting on my desk…and it worked quite well for a pre-beta product.

I suppose unfortuately for Nortel, they actually handed me something that wasn’t all that I really needed.  And, having seen what was possible, I went on a journey that would take several months to find the best “SSL VPN” available.  There was no vendor that I did not talk to: Cisco, Citrix, Safeweb, uRoam and, last but not least, Neoteris.  And while Neoteris turned out to be the last one I reviewed, it was immediately obvious that we had found a winner.

Now came the tough part.  Despite Nortel being a well respected partner, I had to break the news to them that we had decided to move forward with Neoteris as our go-forward strategy.  Then I had to submit a business case and obtain executive level approval to partner with a Silicon Valley startup, which is something that a < $80B corporation tends to stay well away from.  And finally, I had to convince Neoteris to make several code changes (single sign-on, default landing pages, etc..) to adapt themselves to the McKesson application needs.  And if I could pull all of this off, then McKesson would get the solution that fit their applications better than anything else.  Thankfully, that’s exactly how it all worked out.

After a few more years at McKesson, I witnessed NetScreen acquiring Neoteris and Juniper acquiring Netscreen.  Eventually, my desire to join Juniper and become a much bigger part in the success of this product won out and I made my move.  Within a few months I was a Juniper employee and didn’t even care that my job title had changed from product manager (at McKesson) product specialist (at Juniper).  I was in and having so much fun!  And after a few years in that role, I again became a product manager for the SSL VPN product line!

Anyway, that’s how it all happened.  Having worked with the Juniper SSL VPN since 2002 and ultimately taking on a challenging product management position, I can simply not imagine a better place for me to be.  I get to talk to customers, partners, and developers on a daily basis that are just as excited as I am about how well this product has been for them and how it continues to get better and better.

Oh yeah, I’m also one of the authors for the “Juniper Networks Secure Access SSL VPN Configuration Guide”  Syngress Press,  ISBN 13:978-1-59749-200-3