TechEd North America 2011 in Atlanta has already finished, and we managed to get some news from friends that have participated. During that week, a friend and a fellow MVP Mark Parris, made an interesting observation: There was no booth and no Product Team present for TMG… Is there an explanation for this?

As Mark Parris says, there was a blog post by Deb Schinder that says that Microsoft has confirmed that it is not going to be shipping another full version release of TMG. Sad but probably true.

Here is the original text of Deb Schinder’s blog post:

“In a Gartner report titled Magic Quadrant for Secure Web Gateway, published May 25, the first thing we noticed when perusing the matrix of challengers, leaders, niche players and visionaries in the SWG space is that a prominent name is missing in action: that of Microsoft. But if you read on, you find out why.

On page 5, you’ll find a statement that is likely to shock and dismay many Microsoft customers, which says that Microsoft has confirmed to Gartner that it is not going to be shipping another full version release of TMG. The report goes on to say that TMG is in sustaining mode and Microsoft doesn’t intend to compete head-to-head with other vendors in that space. The good news is that the usual five year mainstream/five year extended support lifecycle still applies.

What does this mean for Microsoft in the security space? What does it mean for those organizations with current deployments of TMG? I anticipate many questions (and, I hope, some answers) in the weeks to come, and I’ll be taking a closer look at this development next week in my Microsoft InSights column over on TechRepublic, so stay tuned.”

In case you want to read the full blog post, you can find it here.