I cut my workout short this morning so I could get into the office to watch Cambia Security disappear.

As many of you know by now, nCircle has acquired Cambia Security and me along with it. It's a terrific move on the part of both companies (the technology part, not the "me" part necessarily).

As we've worked on this acquisition over the past few months, I've been impressed with two things about nCircle: How solid their (our) technology is and the extent to which nCircle has been able to establish itself as a standard with large companies. For a private and relatively small firm, nCircle has an astonishingly strong presence at the enterprise level for security and risk management.

So, I'm pretty pumped about the opportunity this acquisition represents. I really do think we have a combination of capabilities that few other companies can match. Still, when the moment actually came, the transition was more poignant than I thought it'd be.

For the past two years, I've worked hard with a team of incredibly talented people here in Atlanta to bring an agentless configuration compliance solution to market and to make it as effective and as well-known as possible. That journey ended this morning when the Cambia web site vanished for the last time and was replaced by the redirects to the nCircle site. I sat alone in a silent office at 8 am as I watched the Cambia home page go dark.

Now, I don't want you to think I'm unhappy with this acquisition. It's terrific. It was just harder to watch the Cambia stuff go away than I expected. Transitions like this often are, I suppose.

So one journey ends and another begins. Our mandate now is to execute. To get the products integrated and to deliver nCircle Configuration Compliance Manager as part of a larger, even more powerful, product line. It's a pretty good company I've joined and I'm very much looking forward to see where this new road leads.

My wife and I are considering a major renovation to our home and I found myself thinking about the likely impact on our property value. The "conventional wisdom" says that bathrooms and kitchens offer the highest return on investment.

And that got me thinking about the concept of "conventional wisdom". Conventional wisdom, in my opinion, is simply an excuse for people not to have to think too hard about the decisions they need to make. "Do the safe thing," they all say. "Nobody ever got fired for buying ______."

Now, speaking as a former marketing person, CW is your friend. If you can elevate your solution or your brand to the glorious pinnacle of "conventional wisdom", all the market mojo is on your side. It becomes much easier to sell your product because your audience already accepts its value. Of course, this usually doesn't happen for companies with revenues less than $1B.

On the other hand, as a product manager, CW is the enemy. Once you become comfortable that your solution rocks, then you must resist the inertial drag of success and continue to look for ways to make it better. Or for technologies that could displace it. One of the hardest things to do as a product manager is to continue to worry about how you're going to make your own successful product obsolete, even though you know there are competitors out there working hard to do just that.

My personal theory is that, when it comes to IT security, a concept is pretty much obsolete as by the time the market labels it "conventional wisdom". Our market moves too fast via aggressive innovation for any new concept to survive unchallenged and unchanged for too long. Even in the mature security sub-markets of firewalls and anti-virus, there is still innovation in the form of packaging and update mechanisms. Not to mention the coalescence of adjacent technologies like IPS and spyware.

And I don't think this is a bad thing, BTW. Innovation followed by evolution and then widespread adoption is a tried-and-true market curve. In this day and age, I just don't trust any pure security solution that labels itself as "conventional wisdom".

Of course, my wife and I are going to update our kitchen and bathrooms, so what do I know?