I know of a few other players. Lots of companies are jumping into the VPN space.
VPNs are more than security. They involve security (encryption, remote access authentication and access control), and Quality of Service (QOS) and bandwidth management. Many vendors are focusing only on the security issues. The smart ones, such as Checkpoint, are also focusing on QOS and bandwidth management. I expect Bay, CISCO, and Ascend to also play in the QOS space.
CISCO (Firewalls and encrypting routers, SF Bay area)
Red Creek (CISCO Partner, SF Bay Area)
CheckPoint (Firewalls, VPNs, Bandwidth Management, SF Bay area)
Shiva (Purchased Isolation Systems a Toronto based company)
Microsoft (Supporting PPTP, L2TP, and IPSEC in Win95, Win98, NT)
TimeStep (a Newbridge affiliate, Ottawa Canada),
IRE (Early market share leader in VPN devices, Baltimore)
V-ONE (Remote Access VPN Software, Washington DC area)
Network Associates (Firewalls, VPNs, Virus Scanning, SF Bay area)
Aventail (Remote Access VPN Software, Seattle)
Indus River (Remote Access VPN Software and Devices, Boston area)
Good discussions on these products are in the trade magazines such as Network World. This list covers mostly software and devices.
Telecomm and Internet Service Providers are providing VPN services over the Internet (GTE, ATT, AOL, MCI, UUNet, etc). Most use the products listed above.
American Internet in Boston area company is focusing on remote access and network provisioning infrastructure software. They recently announced a CISCO relationship.
Another important VPN Infrastructure software component is the Certificate Authority (CA). This component provides secure authentication credentials to individuals and organizations for identification and access control. Players in this space are Verisign, Entrust (a Northern Telecomm spin off), and GTE Cybertrust. Many of the software products and devices mentioned above use one or more of these CA products.
Gregg Lebovitz |
