The company said early this year that it is banking on RapidStream products, which come in at the high end of its catalog, for some sales growth this year. RapidStream, acquired by WatchGuard in February 2002, did not account for much revenue last year.
WatchGuard’s director of marketing Dave Crilley said the RapidStream product line is gathering momentum. The company hopes VPN speed, based on its proprietary ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) will be its competitive differentiator.
The firewall market is pretty much saturated, Crilley said. What’s still growing in new installations is VPNs. That’s the market that’s going to drive sales.
The RapidStream 2200, which lists for $5,000, can handle 120Mbps of VPN throughput, WatchGuard said, which compares to 130Mbps for Nokia’s $11,995 IP380. The 2200 is price-comparable to the Nokia IP350, which has 60Mbps VPN throughput and costs $5,795.
The IP350 and 2200 are both targeted at the remote-office-branch-office, or ROBO, market. Both lines of appliances are based on Check Point Software Technologies Ltd’s Firewall-1/VPN-1 software and use its SecureXL acceleration APIs.
Nokia’s devices are market-leading, and have better firewall performance than the RapidStream devices. The IP380 claims firewall throughput of 600Mbps, three times as much as the RapidStream 2200. Nokia also says its product’s manageability and reliability is superior.
[The Nokia product] is very successful, Nokia’s VP of product management and marketing Dan MacDonald said. It has so much more value beyond throughput. Price/performance is not measured on throughput alone.Rapidstream’s 2200 will not be available immediately in Japan, where the older 2100 model is selling, but it will be sold in the US and Europe, where the 2100 did not really have much of an impact, Crilley said.
Source:Computerwire
