About RCL & Associates

RCL & Associates is a Boston-based consulting firm specializing in providing implementation-ready counsel and advocacy services to senior management in Information Security. Leveraging more than fifteen years experience in IT Strategy consulting and product management, RCL & Associates takes a unique perspective on the traditional industry analyst role and brings it forward into the twenty first century.

The role of industry analysts is dramatically different from what it was just a few years ago. The explosion of information available via the Internet has redefined the source of value away from reports and market studies and towards a much more consultative, hands-on approach. At the same time the speed with which strategy must be executed has increased tremendously. Companies simply don't have the time to wait six months for an analyst report to give them guidance on which markets to go after. Often times the window of opportunity must be seized in a matter of weeks, not months, if a market penetration campaign is to be successful.

RCL & Associates has responded to the needs of its clients by mirroring that flexibility. As a virtual corporation, our overhead stays low while the variety of projects we can accommodate, from single consulting sessions to multiple month onsite product marketing projects, stays high.

Typical projects include strategic review sessions, competitive analysis, and go-to-market planning. We also have extensive experience as a product marketing and product management professional and would be willing to work in that capacity on a contract basis.

We feel that the best way to be of value to the vendor community is to have a deep understanding of the practical issues facing end-user organizations today. There is no substitute for direct experience in this regard. That is why RCL & Associates spends most of its time on both a formal and informal basis getting to know end-users through both project and non-project work. We have extensive qualitative research capabilities to help both vendors and end-users make sense of security technology investments. Possible end-user research projects include:

- Technology vendor selection

- Return on investment analysis

- Best practices and benchmarking

- Security adoption profiling

- Disaster recovery and business continuity planning assessment

Recent project work includes:

- Strategy analysis session with a leading distributed denial of service (DDOS) supplier to sharpen selling message and differentiate among competing solutions

- Strategy planning session plus purchase justification study and white paper to prepare a leading anti-virus for successful U.S. product launch

- Business case justification white paper for outsourced remote access

- Technology impact assessment white paper for secure hardware and software system for PCs and other personal devices

- Delivered a "Security Trends" presentation as part of a securing consulting and managed security services seminar

- Developed a four-page, rapid turn-around white paper on secure web access for a joint promotional campaign for two networking hardware suppliers

- Strategy analysis session for European-based system management Software Company with product introduction plans for the U.S. market.

- Outsourced product management/product marketing services for a start-up supplier of web application security hardware and software