CEI Patrick Lo outlined these three alternatives, adding that the company wasn’t in a hurry to decide because it has just closed the acquisition of SMB NAS vendor Infrant Technologies and so will be busy integrating its ReadyNAS products into its portfolio for the next few months.

They currently have a desktop offering that scales to 2TB and a rack-mount going up to 3TB, so we’ll extend that to 6TB and 8TB by the end of the year, he added.

Unified threat management appliances are multi-function security gateways, designed primarily for the SMB space, with features that usually include a firewall/VPN, anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering and IDS/IPS. As to the decision on which route to take in this context, Lo said he expected to know which way the company would go by the back end of 2007.

Deal with Avaya for bundles with IPT

Other initiatives occupying Netgear of late are its newly announced WLAN switch and thin AP portfolio and its relationship with Avaya for a combined IP telephony, PoE switch and FW/VPN offering into SMB.

The IPT capability is delivered by Avaya with its Quick Edition peer-to-peer technology, which obviates the need for a central phone server or a PBX, with the phones themselves shipping with all the functionality on board, such as call hold, transfer, paging, as well as auto attendant, conferencing, a single inbox for voice and email and the ability to have office calls ring on a mobile phone.

The first package is for up to 20 users and we’ll grow the portfolio, said Lo.

Regarding the three routes to a UTM offering, the Netgear CEO said the company’s other security offerings, namely FW/VPN and the SSL VPN gateways it launched last year, were both the result of collaboration with TeamF1 Inc, a specialist developer of software for the OEM market, based in Fremont, California with its programmers in India. However, both OEMing and M&A are part of its modus operandi: the switched WLAN portfolio is OEMed from Aruba, while the ReadyNAS products come from acquisition.

10GbE on smart switches

Beyond UTM, Lo said that, having introduced Gigabit connectivity on its smart switch range earlier this year, it now plans to offer 10Gb there in 12-18 months’ time, the target market for this being university research labs where connectivity needs to be cheap and fast, he argued.

The reason to intro it in the smart switch range first, he went on, is the opportunity for differentiation.

If we introduced it on Layer-3 switches we wouldn’t be the first, but we have the opportunity to be on the smart range, he said, reiterating his company’s claim to have invented the smart switch category earlier this decade: smart switches are Web-managed Layer-2 switches with a degree of functionality and capabilities beyond unmanaged L2, but with less than fully managed L3 and at a considerably lower price point.

The silicon provider for the 10Gb smart offering will probably be Broadcom, whose chipsets underpin Netgear’s GbE stackables with software from LVL7, chosen when that ISV was still independent, before it was acquired by Broadcom. And of course, since they will be smart L2 rather than managed L3 devices, the flavor of 10Gb Netgear plans to deliver will be on copper rather than fiber, i.e. 10GBaseT.

Our View

That Netgear is looking at a UTM offering is no surprise. The vendor Lo considers his most formidable competitor in SMB, 3Com, is building a security portfolio around its TippingPoint IPS acquisition and this week unveiled its X-Family of what it calls Unified Security Platforms at Interop. Other contenders in the space, D-Link and ZyXEL, both launched UTM offerings in February last year.