The Hindu Business Line : Nevis Network develops chip-cum-security tool

WITH an investment of $40 million, a chip that can work 100 times faster than the Pentium chip and lock down the local area network (LAN) from security threats has been developed at the research and development centre of Nevis Network in Pune.

Talking to presspersons, Mr Charles Dauber, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nevis Network, on Monday announced the launch of its LAN enforcer products, a family of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) based security system to lock down LAN from internal security threats. This is the only product, which combines the chip and the software, in the global market, which can protect against laptop-born viruses, unauthorised confidential data access, enforce business policies upon network activity and meet US regulatory reporting and auditing requirements, he said.

Giving a brief description of the product, Mr Charles said the LAN enforcer sits on the network and when the laptop is plugged in, it first checks whether the plugged instrument is the latest update and confirms the authorisation of the person using it. "If the person wants to access data that is not authorised, the network immediately detects it and does not allow the person to go ahead, thus, avoiding any mishap to occur on the network."

Mr Charles said the product could support 25, 50 or even 1,000 users per box and could be scaled up to any requirement. He said the product would be available by the first quarter of 2006 and priced between $12,995 and $34,995. He added that the next phase would be to bring this product to the enterprise customer on a global basis and build the sales team.

Nevis Networks has a staff strength of 170 in Pune and 30 in Mountain View, California, headquarters of the company.

New Path investment plans: Mr Vinod Dham, co-founder and Managing Director of New Path Ventures, the funding company for Nevis Networks, said the company has now invested in four companies, Nevis Networks, Insilica and Telsima, while declining to state the fourth.

New Path has about 40 per cent holding in Nevis Networks. He said it was looking at investing in about 20 companies in India, and, of this, about six to eight companies would be in the hybrid US-India model.

Mr Vinod said that it was also looking at existing software companies, which had the infrastructure, and was in the field of building software for mobile phones as also data mining and analytical research. The kitty for this is about $250 million.

Mr Vinod pointed out that about $2 billion had come to the domestic market in the form of funds, of which about 12-15 per cent was by the venture capitalists. His forecast is that it would touch $4 billion and the VC funding would also touch about 20-25 per cent.

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