Here is a story about a new SonicWall firewall. (It is extensive quotes in stories like this that make blogs a great place to clarify things).

The first quote:

The subscription fee, however, does not come as a surprise to Pete Lindstrom, research director at Spire Securities [sic]. "It’s borderline deceptive, yet not extremely unreasonable," Lindstrom said. "Subscription services nickel and dime you to death, that’s how they make their money," he said.

The product/subscription combination is always a bit suspicious to me. Some folks, like TiVo, do a reasonable job of disclosing this information. At this stage, to trumpet the price point and not disclose the subscription pricing is, in my mind, a bad decision. The fact that there is a subscription is not troubling, however, it is useful and necessary for any solution in this space. Btw, the "nickel and diming" thing is sarcasm – I often say that about my kids’ Catholic grade school (who also make volunteering mandatory, hmph). (One final point, all prices were quoted to me in U.S. dollars).

The second quote:

Since you are adding more filtering capability and intelligent analysis capability, ultimately a (TZ 150) would be slower, I expect," Lindstrom said.

This was the distillation of an extended discussion of the performance implications and comparisons across products. Yes, I know that this is not an absolute, but if we could get to a ceterus parabus level of equality – say, by taking the same box and turning off all capability except firewall, then  I expect the performance would be slower with all options/services running. Btw, it is also necessary and useful, in my opinion, to have these services running.

Not only may the low price of the product interest small businesses, but possibly individual consumers as well, said Spire’s Lindstrom. People with an interest in technology might have an interest in purchasing one for private use. Nevertheless, the subscription fee will probably effect consumers’ decision to buy the unit.

"When people find out about the subscription fee, (SonicWall) should be aware that there may be some annoyed customers out there," Lindstrom said.

I expect that Sonicwall will clarify this during the sales process. There is lots of skepticism in the security space, and hiding something like this would not work out well. They know that.