1/23/2006 -- Is Cisco Systems Inc. building castles in the sand with its much-hyped Network Admission Control (NAC) initiative? Not if new research from market watcher Infonetics is to be believed.

According to Infonetics, worldwide manufacturer revenue for NAC enforcement products and services will explode by 1,101 percent, growing from $323 million last year to $3.9 billion by 2008.

A full-fledged NAC solution consists of three components (client protection, network enforcement and backend protection), but the Infonetics report focuses on the enforcement market, which includes network-integrated NAC enforcement devices, NAC enforcement appliances, and SSL VPNs for NAC enforcement.

"By far the largest portion of NAC enforcement revenue between now and 2008 comes from network-integrated enforcement devices, but the biggest change is in NAC enforcement appliances, whose share of the market nearly triples between 2005 and 2008," said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst at Infonetics and author of the study, in a statement.

According to Wilson, Cisco, Microsoft and the Trusted Computing Group are the three big players in NAC-dom. The last is an independent consortium that's working on standard implementations for NAC. Cisco's NAC solution is the most recognized brand of the three main NAC solutions, however, followed by Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP), and then the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect solution -- a distant third.

Infonetics says the market for NAC enforcement appliances, in particular, will go supernova next year -- growing by 3,062 percent by 2008. Elsewhere, the market for network integrated NAC-enforcement devices will expand by almost 1,000 percent between 2005 and 2008, while that for SSL VPNs for NAC enforcement will grow by a more modest 798 percent. -Stephen Swoyer