First impression and feedback

As I see it there's a lot of frustration about the way the UTM took in the last few years, especially among the long term Astaro admins like me.

But let's reflect on our journey, fellow travellers, before we jump to conclusions.

After the aquisition by Sophos everything was going along as before, with the usual ups and downs that we were all used to from the Astaro days.

Then Cyberoam came along and v15 was introduced as the next generation of UTM. That of course was wishful thinking from Sophos and I can't tell why they took that road, but they did. Missed quality and user experience expectations and the feature gap prevented it from being an alternative to the Astaro UTM.

After the feedback to v15, v16 was intended to improve quality and more importantly close the feature gaps. Again neither goal was fully accomplished.
Now it became clear that putting more lipstick on the pig wasn't solving the problem.

What we saw since then is encouraging to me:
1. There were several quality focused releases. That means Sophos came to the conclusion that quality is an issue and acted upon it. Of course that means that filling the feature gap was slowing down. But you can't have it all, right?
2. Alan stated earlier that there is a project called Picaso that is going to replace the configuration management. Let's be clear: that means we are going to see a rewrite of most of the product. Which is the right thing to do imho. I assume we are talking about v18 here, but maybe Alan may say a few words on scope and timeline of Picaso.
3. When they are going to rewrite the configuration system and UI, I bet we'll also see a new CLI. Alan?

So they came to the same conlusions as we did. And they started executing a plan to fix the problems before v17 was started.

v17 is therefore a release to bridge the gap until v18.

That's giving me hope and the virtue to live with my frustration for a little longer.

Cheers,
Stumpy

Stumpy,

thanks for sharing your thoughts. The other issue is that they spent 2 years to adjust Cyberoam OS, so a lot of resources were busy on XG while the UTM was almost abandoned. Take a look at what happened in terms of quality after 9.3 release. Several bugs (SSO bug was a big one) and no more improvements. For example, WAF should be up-to-date to reflect new threats and have additional security layers but it is still quite base on that.

For several months, on community, Sophos did not spend a word about frustation and dissatisfied people. I do not even spend a word on v15. UI was horrible.

v16 did a good job in terms of UI (even if some TABs are just positioned in wrong place like NAT under profiles [:S].) I am tired to write and say the same things from years now. It seems that I am the one "who breaks the eggs in the basket!"

I am not that kind of person. And the silence, here, goes on....

Stumpy,

thanks for sharing your thoughts. The other issue is that they spent 2 years to adjust Cyberoam OS, so a lot of resources were busy on XG while the UTM was almost abandoned. Take a look at what happened in terms of quality after 9.3 release. Several bugs (SSO bug was a big one) and no more improvements. For example, WAF should be up-to-date to reflect new threats and have additional security layers but it is still quite base on that.

For several months, on community, Sophos did not spend a word about frustation and dissatisfied people. I do not even spend a word on v15. UI was horrible.

v16 did a good job in terms of UI (even if some TABs are just positioned in wrong place like NAT under profiles [:S].) I am tired to write and say the same things from years now. It seems that I am the one "who breaks the eggs in the basket!"

I am not that kind of person. And the silence, here, goes on....