The application for S4x26 Proof of Concept (POC) Pavilion begins with a simple question.
What problem is your product or service solving?
The POC Pavilion will have a highly realistic asset owner OT environment. (You can watch the reveal of Pavilion provider, system, and architecture on today’s livestream) The eight Pavilion participants will need to install their solution and demo it live on stage and in their exhibit. No canned demo. No hand waving. It will work or it won’t. Attendees will be able to see it and delve into specifics.
We wanted to have a variety of solutions to a variety of problems. We created a three question application, beginning with what we thought was a simple question: “What problem is your product or service solving?”. Something that should be answered in a sentence or two.
All but one application hasn’t stated a problem. Instead they list a number of features, some with corresponding benefits, and a bunch of buzzwords. For example we received:
“provides identity-based zero trust access and deep asset protection, purpose-built for industrial and critical infrastructure environments.”
Some are better, but most failed in clearly explaining what problem is being solved. Why do I need your solution? We didn’t receive anything clear like this:
How can we allow employees and partners outside of OT to securely access only what they are authorized to access on OT? And how do we prevent and detect all other attempts to gain unauthorized remote access?
Maybe the security jargon works. It’s near universal in the marketing content and pitches. When I go to an OT security vendor’s site it’s hard to identify the one to three asset owner problems the product will solve.
I do remember the early days of the OT detection market. It was the asset owner prospects who discovered the problem these products could solve. The vendors went in with stories of attacks and how they could be detected. The customers saw the asset inventory and said, “your product can tell me what’s on my network!” After hearing this over and over the vendors pivoted.
We will work with the eight POC Pavilion participants to have simple, one to two sentence statements of the problem they are solving for the asset owner. They also need to provide a criteria for how the POC should be evaluated. How will we know if the demo, the POC installation, is a success? And they will provide the price of the POC solution and the time it took to implement the POC.
It should be fun.