Plans to Deliver Integrated Wide-Area Data Services, Email, Web and UTM Security in a Single Appliance
Released: 16 April 2008, San Jose and San Francisco, USASecure Computing Corporation (Nasdaq: SCUR), a leading enterprise gateway security provider, and Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced a multi-phased partnership that will provide customers with best-of-breed, comprehensive, and cost-effective technology solutions that enable customers to deliver accelerated data access to enterprise users while protecting critical information and infrastructure from security threats.
The partnership between Secure Computing and Riverbed® takes advantage of the complementary capabilities of the companies’ technologies – Secure Computing’s preeminent gateway security technology and award-winning Riverbed WDS technology. The partnership will be implemented in two phases:
In phase-one the two companies will jointly offer their solutions through a select group of channel partners to address both WDS and web security to companies looking to both increase their application performance across the WAN and secure their gateways to the Internet. Riverbed Steelhead® appliances and Steelhead Mobile software enables application acceleration, the optimization of bandwidth, and improved quality of service (QoS) and Secure Computing’s Secure Web (previously called Webwasher) will provide web security protection including anti-malware, reputation based URL filtering, and anti-spam.
In phase-two of the partnership, Secure Computing’s Secure SnapGear® firewall technology, its SmartFilter reputation-based web filtering and its TrustedSource global reputation based antispam technology will be offered as a software module that can be run on the RiOS™ Services Platform (RSP). Running on the RSP allows Secure Computing and Riverbed to offer Secure’s market-leading functionality and the core Riverbed acceleration functionality within a single hardware platform – the Steelhead appliance. Using the RSP, customers can now deliver virtualized edge services for branch offices that are both best-of-breed and cost effective.
Companies that take advantage of the phase-one bundled offering now will be given the opportunity in phase-two to migrate to the equivalent stand-alone, integrated appliance in the future.
“We’ve been seeing the growing demand for both WDS and gateway security in the market,” said James Volpe, President of Corsa Network Technologies, a reseller of both Riverbed and Secure Computing products. “With more and more data being shared within organizations and the ever expanding Web 2.0 threat, companies need to optimize their bandwidth utilization while also ensuring that malicious content isn’t being propagated. This combined best-of-breed solution solves these problems without having to settle for second tier products.”
Technology and Product Capabilities
Customers will benefit from the solutions’ core technologies, including the following:
Steelhead WDS products: WDS -- Steelhead appliances and Mobile software delivers more responsive applications, enables successful consolidation of distributed IT infrastructure, and expedites network-based backup and replication. By deploying Steelhead appliances and software, enterprises can typically accelerate application performance from five to 50 times – and in some cases up to 100 times –making it easy for organizations to accelerate the applications that are most important to their users, anywhere in the world.
The Steelhead family is built on an application-independent architecture that optimizes all TCP traffic for bandwidth utilization and TCP behavior. On top of this architecture, Riverbed has built a series of application streamlining modules that further optimize applications like Windows, Exchange, Oracle, SAP, SharePoint, and many more.
Secure Web: Reputation-based Web Security—Secure Computing provides the industry’s first and only reputation-based Web gateway security solution that protects enterprises from spyware, phishing, malware, data leakage, and Internet misuse, while ensuring policy enforcement, regulatory compliance and a productive application environment. The solution employs the most sophisticated behavioral and signature-based techniques for stopping malware, as well as patented content analysis software for stopping data leakage. Secure Web also leverages its industry-leading reputation system, TrustedSource™. Like a credit agency provides credit scores to enable reliable commerce, TrustedSource is the only reputation system to provide real-time multi-dimensional reputation scores for URLs, domains, images, messages and IP addresses.
Combining TrustedSource with several advanced spam filtering technologies deployed within the solution will allow customers to routinely block more than 99 percent of malicious spam email traffic while maintaining a false positive rate of less than one in one million. Since TrustedSource rejects up to 85 percent of all incoming messages before they enter the network, archiving requirements are reduced by this same percentage, providing customers with yet another avenue to a rapid return on investment.
Secure SnapGear: Firewall/UTM Appliance -- Secure SnapGear technologies, which will be included in the phase-two integrated appliance, is a complete office network-in-a-box Internet security appliance for businesses, with wide area networking tools normally only available in enterprise-class devices. Secure SnapGear is the only networking device needed for office PCs to be networked with one another, connect securely to the Internet, connect to the corporate WAN and service all remote access VPN needs. Secure SnapGear manages it all easily and cost-effectively by converging all networking, firewall, intrusion prevention, security and remote access requirements into one high-speed, highly reliable, small form-factor appliance.
“Companies have experienced rapid increases in network traffic as well as increases in file sizes and rich content, and that has negatively impacted the response times of business-critical applications,” said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing and alliances at Riverbed. “In addition to accelerating access to these applications, it is a logical extension to now enable third-party vendors, such as Secure Computing, to leverage Steelhead appliance deployments to offer best-of-breed solutions and services so our customers can reduce their costs, management headaches, and IT footprint.”
“With the emergence of Web 2.0, there’s been a dramatic increase in malware, requiring companies to thoroughly secure every connection to the Internet,” said Atri Chatterjee, senior vice president of marketing, Secure Computing. “Wrapping security into other required functionalities like WAN optimization and simplifying their management is a concept we think customers will quickly embrace.”
Availability
The multi-product bundle is scheduled to be available through channel partners in early May, and Secure Computing’s software module for the RSP is scheduled for availability in early 2009.
About Secure Computing Corporation
Secure Computing Corporation (Nasdaq:SCUR), a leading provider of enterprise gateway security, delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that help customers protect their critical Web, email and network assets. Over half the Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 are part of our more than 22,000 global customers, supported by a worldwide network of more than 2,000 partners. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and has offices worldwide. For more information, see http://www.securecomputing.com.
This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to Secure Computing’s Secure Web and Secure SnapGear products and the expected benefits of such technologies, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements are delays in product development, undetected software errors or bugs, competitive pressures, technical difficulties, changes in customer requirements, general economic conditions and the risk factors detailed from time to time in Secure Computing’s periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding future product plans and product offerings, statements relating to Riverbed's ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations, and statements regarding the growth characteristics of, and customer demand relating to, the WDS market. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 15, 2008. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Additional information about Riverbed (Nasdaq: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
