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Non-Tech : Secret Squirrels hit! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Trumptown who wrote (3429)	12/17/1998 7:35:00 PM
From: Tom Swift	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12872

Hmm, I can't remember looking at STAC and I can't find the filings for HIFN. I remember Stacker though -- Yuck! I'm glad to see they have discontinued this product. From a quick glance at the STAC Dec. '97 10K: The software products don't look too interesting, I don't think that they can replace PC-Anywhere without a fight and Stacker is a (dead) POS. The royalties are a good sign, MS and IBM are both licencees. There is no real information about the hardware (HIFN) aspects. It seems to be used for data compression and encryption in routers and hardware (?) firewalls. This seems, at first glance, to have prospects for market growth. They mention Cisco: Hi/fn has licensed its data compression software to companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, Ascend Communications Inc., 3Com Corporation, and Bay Networks Inc., all of which play significant roles in the development and marketing of Internet and virtual private network products. Virtual private networks enable businesses to reduce their data communications costs by using the public networks, such as the Internet, as an alternative to private leased data communication links. In addition, Hi/fn, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Cisco have co-authored a proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force (the "IETF") for the implementation of lossless data compression in the IP Security ("IPSec") protocol. The IPSec is intended for implementation in a wide variety of networking equipment and will facilitate the deployment of virtual private networks. However, there can be no assurance that these proposals will ultimately be adopted by the IETF, or that alternatives using other data compression technology will not be proposed and adopted. If this pans out, they could do well. So, the question is, what/who is the competition?