Verizon Business has announced a NAC service in which it helps customers decide what NAC product best fits its needs and then installs it.

If the customer chooses Cisco’s gear, Verizon will manage it, too.

As part of its NAC package, Verizon sits down with customers to find out exactly what problems they hope to solve with NAC (Compare NAC products) and then pick a vendor that best meets their goals and their environment.

They use a pretty sensible approach, taking into consideration the current infrastructure and vendors. So if a customer already has Symantec Endpoint Protection, they may want to use Symantec NAC because of its tight integration.

Verizon says one customer had bought Cisco NAC gear and wanted to hire Verizon to implement it. During the early stages of analyzing the situation, they realized that the NAC gear needed to integrate with PatchLink’s patch-management software. Cisco’s gear couldn’t do that out of the box, and software development costs to make it work cost too much so the customer went with another vendor.

Verizon says it supports 17 different NAC platforms, and that number will grow. As customers express an interest in vendors not on the list, Verizon checks them out and determines whether it can support them. If so, they get added to the list.

The service provider has a lab with vendors’ NAC gear as well as ancillary security platforms that customers might have. Verizon sets up a facsimile of the customer’s network in the lab to determine ahead of time that the NAC product chosen will work in that environment.

The service charges a minimum $1,000 one-time service fee, plus a minimum $1,730 per month per device, and monitoring and management fees start at $2,080 per month per device.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.