3Com Announces TippingPoint Security Platform

Betting that intrusion prevention will be the nexus around which security technologies evolve, this week 3Com will unveil the TippingPoint X505, an integrated security platform built on Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) technology.

Scheduled to ship next month, the X505 comes from the company's TippingPoint security division that 3Com bought earlier this year. The platform features an inspection firewall, IPSec VPN, bandwidth management, Web content filtering and dynamic routing.

The solution is flexible enough to be targeted at both large enterprises whose remote offices don't have on-site support staff and at midsize customers.

"This fits the traditional TippingPoint customers who are very large Fortune 100 companies looking for a solution to address their remote office needs," says Scott Rivers, a 3Com product manager. "We'll also go after the traditional 3Com midtier market because the products on the market now aren't protecting them from threats, and they need a better solution."

3Com partners say they're looking forward to getting the new platform up and running.

"We'll definitely integrate it into our product line," says Phil O'Reilly, CEO of Solunet, a solution provider in Melbourne, Fla. "The TippingPoint division solicited heavy input from partners during the development process, and they pretty much hit a bulls-eye on this one."

He says the X505's versatility should be one of its strongest selling points.

"Customers are getting much more concerned about having highly integrated edge-networking products that can relate back to the core," O'Reilly says. "This product addresses the core of midsize networks and the edge or larger ones."

3Com officials says the X505 performs total packet-flow inspection to block malicious traffic, throttle nonessential traffic and prioritize mission-critical voice, data or video traffic. They also say it will reduce the financial and management costs. The X505 can save bandwidth by blocking attacks and throttling nonessential traffic, such as peer-to-peer file sharing.