Providing Real-time Network Protection

IndiaPost, May 7, 2004
By Archana Ravinder

“A product which is generation ahead, an outstanding team whether it is on the management level or the individual contributor side, a well financed company with a good set of investors, differentiates iPolicy from the rest,” says a confident Dr. Prabhu Goel, Chairman & CEO of Fremont, California based iPolicy Networks.

The CEO is brimming with enthusiasm and rightly so for iPolicy Networks, the only provider of an Intrusion Prevention Firewall for real-time network protection, has been recently positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the coveted "Visionary" category of its 2004 Enterprise Firewall Magic Quadrant report, a widely recognized and highly regarded comparison scorecard that rates security vendors in terms of their ability to execute and the completeness of their vision.
The company founded in early 2000 through the merger of- US based TunnelNet and India based Duet Technologies created ripples when it raised more than $26 million last November in an early round of venture financing, led by investors WK Technology Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners and Dali Hook Partners. Goel who took over as CEO last April notes that this was driven by iPolicy’s foray into the Enterprise Security market which happened almost during the same time.

“Security is a very hot space, estimated at $5-10 billion and when the company was initially founded it got taken in the direction of providing carrier oriented products, service provider oriented products,” observes Goel. “We had an architecture that lent itself to very high performance which is what carriers need. Carriers have very high bandwidth requirements and we needed a product, which could address that requirement, and we saw nobody in that space, this gave us an opportunity to practically own that space,” adds Goel. The company within months of launching its carrier oriented product, signed up one of the largest carriers in the world as its customer.

Moving ahead he says, “The carrier market in the last couple of years has been very soft with no capital spending, very little investment and that brought about a change in our strategy, a year ago we decided to enter the enterprise space as well.” The company today spans both the carrier as well as the enterprise market delivering “Total Intrusion Prevention” through the industry's first Unified Security System, the “ipEnforcer.”

“All that these traditional firewalls do, is access control,” says Goel. Adding to that he says, “Our way of looking at it is that the firewall itself has holes in it which may allow viruses, worms, intrusions, DOS attacks etc. We have architected the firewall in such a way that it not only provides the traditional function but also blocks these holes.”

The innovative product combines the power of multiple, interactive security applications including Firewall, VPN, Intrusion Detection, Intrusion Prevention, Anti-Virus, URL Screening, Surveillance all offered on a single, high-performance platform capable of wire-speed throughput of up to 5Gbps. Security vendors in the past have had separate boxes for each one of these applications so when a packet went from one box to another it would get inspected again and again thereby dramatically increasing the latency. ipEnforcer on the other hand looks at the packet exactly once and therefore minimizes network latency.

“For us combining all these features into one single product,” says Goel, “The important criteria was of being able to offer multigigabit wire speed, while keeping the solution easily manageable, a situation where you could provide powerful management of thousands of these boxes sitting all over the world where traffic from multiple customers could be entering each box and the carrier would be managing each of these customers’ separately in terms of their security policies.”

The company distributes the products by way of appointed resellers when addressing the enterprise market and through direct sales agents distributed between their wholly owned subsidiary in Noida, India and their US office while targeting the carrier market. On the recent outsourcing battle, Goel observes, “This was a promise that the Internet made that is of globalizing the entire world and it has done so by doing away with boundaries. At the same time it is very hard for me to imagine how one can legislate that the businesses should not outsource because in the end all businesses have to make money and in order to survive one of the key things is to cut costs.”

The CEO observes that the current economic downturn has not really hit the security market as bad as some of the other high tech sectors. “IT is mission critical to most companies, and if the IT infrastructure goes down then the cost of that would be gigantic so customers see security as a relatively small investment to ensure that the IT infrastructure does not go down. Apart from that the recent laws that have been passed require companies to protect their critical infrastructure through documents and auditable procedures and that makes it even more compelling for customers to go and invest in security,” says Goel.

The dynamic CEO of iPolicy who recently received the prestigious IEEE Industrial Pioneer Award for his work on design modeling and design verification through Verilog and Verilog-based design tools apart from being regarded highly in the corporate circles, devotes a substantial amount of time to philanthropic pursuits from donating 250,000 for the Gujarat Earthquake Relief Fund to setting up the Foundation for Excellence (FFE), a non-profit committed to imparting education among the immensely bright students from the financially backward communities, to starting a cyber security research center at IIT Kanpur says Goel, “The urge to do something that has a lasting impact, drives my philanthropy. FFE over the years has supported more than 8000 children through college education and the value of doing this is that these children then move onto become role models in their community, thereby raising the aspirations of the people around them.”

India he says should demolish its bureaucracy, improve its legal system, and invest in its infrastructure to make sure that it becomes a superpower to reckon with.

Noting the progress of iPolicy he says, “It’s become a very exciting company from a time frame where for the last two years before the financing it was a difficult environment to even survive owing to our high burn rate to a situation now where we have the enterprise product and the carrier product and we have funding and are actively and aggressively selling in countries like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, US among many others,” adds Goel looking at the road ahead for the company, “We are looking at growing the customer base, increase revenues. Our investors are very aggressive and want to take this company to an IPO targeted for late 2005 early 2006,” adds the CEO.

For more information log onto www.ipolicynetworks.com or call 510.687.3000. Every fortnight TrailBlazers profiles achievers, companies revolutionizing the business world. If you are interested in getting your company profiled, then write to us by sending an e-mail to archana@indiapost.com.