ISS Offers Unified Appliance, Pledges To Build Out Channel

The Atlanta-based company's new Proventia M50 security appliance simultaneously blocks viruses, malicious intrusions, worms and other threats to the well-being of a company's IT infrastructure.

Mark Wasiele, ISS's vice president, Channels and Alliances, said the Proventia line is the catalyst to dramatically build up the company's channel efforts. "We never got out of the early adopter phase because our products were too complex," he said. "Proventia is a more channel-friendly product that takes us into the mainstream."

But Proventia itself didn't appear until halfway through the San Jose, Calif., event.

A stage full of technology and business dignitaries first talked about the need for a simple way to fight today's security problems. Steve Forbes, president and CEO of Forbes, lectured about tax cuts and bemoaned the effects of cyber-attacks on electronic commerce. "People need a sense that the pirates will be held at bay," he said.

Howard Schmidt, chief security officer of eBay and a former cyber-security adviser to the White House, spoke of the need to simplify and improve security within the nation's small to midsize companies. And George Gilder, CEO of Gilder Publishing, Great Barrington, Mass., and a leading pundit of the technology industry, called for a unified approach to security, rather than an amalgam of stand-alone products.

Solution providers said ISS's Proventia appliance, which uses ISS-written software to simultaneously analyze TCP traffic for intruders, spam, viruses, worms and other vulnerabilities, provides that unified security front. "This is not just another me-too appliance, because all of the software is developed by ISS rather than by six or seven third parties," said Steve Johnson, president of networking integrator Optimus Solutions, Atlanta. "I think we'll see this product move heavily into the mainstream within the next six months."

Set to be released next month, Proventia M50 will be available at an introductory price of $8,995 through the first calendar quarter of 2004,a $3,595 reduction in cost, the company said.