NeoAccel plans development centres in India

US-based NeoAccel Inc, an Internet security solutions firm, has earmarked a budget of Rs 50 crore to set up software development centres in Chennai, Bangalore and Pune, and expects to hire a couple of hundred systems software engineers over the next 2-3 years.

The company currently has a small operation in Mumbai with about 40 people.

Addressing a press conference after announcing the launch of the company's new technology, Michel Susai, chief executive officer of NeoAccel, said that the company was keen on developing software in a big way in India and was looking at setting up its development centres in Chennai, Bangalore and Pune.

The company has come out with new technology solution called SSL VPN (Security Socket Layer Virtual Private Network) Plus, which is expected to eliminate network problems experienced in conventional SSL VPNs.

It is expected to enable businesses to implement highly-secure, and scalable access with the native network performance of IPSec VPNs. It would also overcome the limitations in the conventional performance-limited web security mechanisms, he said.

The public Internet and wirless LANs have inherent packet loss during transmission. "Our solution is 30 times faster than other SSL VPN solutions during packet loss," Susai said.

SSL VPN Plus solution has been developed to address the customer requirements such as secure remote access, secure wireless access and some secure site-to-site connectivity, he added.

Susai said that the industry was witnessing a transition from IPSec VPN to SSL VPN as SSL VPN brought significant benfits to customers. The IPSec VPN solutions required heavy IT budget for both implementation and continuing maintenance of gateway and clients.

As the market transitions to SSL VPN, NeoAccel expects to be a major player and eyes the leadership position. The VPN and firewall market size was expected to grow to $900 million in 2009 from $127 million in 2004.

Though SSL VPN technology had brought some benefits to customers by overcoming some technical barriers, it has been suffering from high incremental latency of over 40 milliseconds.

He said that NeoAccel's SSL VPN Plus would provide injected latency of just 10 milliseconds for VoIP calls and video conferencing sessions, compared to 14 milliseconds by other SSL VPN solutions.

The company expects its SSL VPN Plus solution to be in much demand with the Indian outsourcing industry due to its low level of latency for both encryption and tunneling of only 10 milliseconds.

SSL VPN-Plus runs on standard Intel-based rackmount and IBM/Intel server blades and is available in software and hardware appliance configurations. The price ranges from $3,000 to $100,000-plus depending on the number of concurrent users.

The company has already launched its solution in the US and Japan and so far sold about 440 server licences in these countries. It is for the first time that it is launching its solution in India.

Michel Susai, founder and former chairman and CEO of NetScaler where he invented and pioneered the patented Request Switching™ technology that accelerates application delivery to handle the bulk of today's commercial Web traffic. About 75 per cent of internet traffic goes through this technology, he said.