Innovators' CornerNETGEAR Stream Scanning
What does the future hold? In each issue, ICT2020 drills down to feature companies, their leaders and their products that are pushing the innovation envelope. This issue's Innovators' Corner features NETGEAR®, a small business equipment provider with newly released network solutions that use a patent-pending technology developed internally by company engineers. We interviewed David Soares, NETGEAR's Senior Vice President, World Wide Sales & SMB Business, to learn more about how the company is breaking new ground with its latest innovative products.
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David Soares, Senior VP,
World Wide Sales &
SMB Business, NETGEAR
For today's small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB), network security concerns abound. "Not only viruses, but spam as well, which accounts for 90 percent of email received at companies," according to Soares.
NETGEAR knows network security. The company has been in business since 1996 and its first products were a range of firewalls, though the company has been developing other small business network solutions for quite some time. In September 2008, NETGEAR purchased CP Secure, whose engineers developed patent-pending stream-based scanning. "The technology is an innovative, in-house development," said Soares.
NETGEAR launched its Web and email ProSecure™ security appliances tailored for small and medium-sized businesses using the Stream Scanning technology that Soares said is five times faster than anything else currently on the market. "This is a high-performance feature that scans email data on the fly as it downloads," said Soares, ensuring minimal latency. The company "best-of-breed" security architecture also provides up to 200 times the virus and malware coverage over other solutions, said Soares.
The Stream Scanning technology is employed in two different solutions: NETGEAR ProSecure Unified Threat Management (UTM), which is geared to small businesses of up to 30 employees, and the Security Threat Management (STM) series of gateway security appliances, targeted toward medium-sized businesses with between 30 and 600 employees.
UTM's flexible, modular design architecture enables it to use virus and malware threat databases from NETGEAR and Sophos™ that are hundreds of thousands of signatures in size, which is up to 200 times more comprehensive than legacy small business UTM platforms. Users can choose email filtering, Web filtering or both, said Soares.
STM appliances employ millions of signatures to protect against known threats, and in-the-cloud zero-hour protection technology to proactively discover and block any suspected threats that have not yet been identified. Likewise, the NETGEAR in-the-cloud Distributed Spam Analysis architecture shields networks from spam, phishing attacks and other email-borne threats.
One additional value point sure to please customers: There are no per-user licensing fees. "We're making licenses very simple and the products affordable," said Soares. NETGEAR is keenly aware that its customer base of small businesses has enterprise-class ambitions, but needs solutions that fall within their budgets.
Keeping Pace with Growing Network Demands
In June, NETGEAR announced its latest next-gen leap, releasing two new ProSafe® Advanced Gigabit Smart Switches that combine Gigabit connectivity, Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and stacking on the same platform. The advanced switching infrastructure is designed to help SMBs make the shift to converged networks.
Each switch features two dedicated HDMI ports delivering up to 20 Gbps stacking bandwidth. Customers can stack up to six switches or 288 ports together and manage them with a single IP address.
Web-managed switches can isolate traffic and structure the network to access certain servers in local networks. "With our Web managed switches all the customer needs is a Web browser to manage the network, which they couldn't do before," said Soares. For example, "the smart switches identify and prioritize IP telephony, which demands a very high priority."
With 10-gigabit uplinks to increase speed to servers, NETGEAR's switch can manage network traffic intelligently and improve QoS and VLAN technology, increasing overall performance of the network, said Soares. NETGEAR is also moving to "green" switches that power down automatically if they're not plugged into a port, and power up when reengaged.
Staying Ahead of the Competition
Developing innovative technology is clearly a source of pride for NETGEAR, but it's also a competitive differentiator. Soares said that "many of our competitors usually catch up to us a year or so after a product launch." Given that level of competition, NETGEAR's commitment to continuing its innovative ways, and focus on "delivering the right enterprise-class performance," sounds like a wise and expedient business plan.
