The Sunnyvale, California-based company will unveil the Content Security Manager 2100 CF, only the second non-firewall product it has brought to market. The first was its SonicPoint access point for wireless LANs, launched in 2004.
SonicWall already offers content filtering on its firewall/VPN portfolio, which it is currently repositioning as unified threat management appliances. It is also trumpeting the fact that analyst firm IDC now places SonicWall in the lead in the U market by units and revenue.
Mike Smart, SonicWall’s European product marketing director said that because the new product can sit behind firewalls from the likes of Cisco and Juniper, it will enable SonicWall to penetrate new accounts. With a dedicated content filtering product, SonicWall is also entering into competition with companies such as Websense and SurfControl, its differentiator being not only the appliance approach, but also the fact that it has brought its deep packet inspection engine to the product, said Smart. This means that we can offer content filtering not only for productivity [detecting employee Web activity that is not related to work] but also security, blocking peer-to-peer and IM, as well as scanning for spyware, he said. The new device starts at $28,000 for a 25-user license and goes up in chunks of users, maxing out at 2,500.
In addition, later this year, SonicWall will further expand its non-firewall device offering with a range of SSL VPN appliances for the SME space. It has already announced its intentions in this regard, talking of a two-product launch and referring to the SSL-VPN 200 and SSL-VPN 2000, promising that they will interoperate seamlessly behind third-party firewalls and deliver enhanced Unified Threat Management protection to remote users. The reference to non-SonicWall firewalls indicates that the same rationale underpins their development as the CSM 2100 CF.
