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What is NetDevices?
Founded in 2003, NetDevices' primary mission is to provide large branch and regional offices with advanced networking solutions that support enterprise business processes, protect critical data, and are just as functional, reliable, and available as the corporate network. NetDevices has developed a simple and elegant solution to meet its mission, the Unified Services Gateway.

A purpose-built, enterprise-grade solution for next-generation IP networks, the gateway unifies multiple services' including standards-based security, next-generation services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), data services, and access services' into a single remotely manageable platform. Built on a modular and "always live" architecture, the Unified Services Gateway guarantees the availability, accessibility, and manageability of all network services at all times.

Who is behind NetDevices?
NetDevices has the most experienced and talented development and management team in the entire security and networking industry. Team members developed several generations of Cisco's routers (7000 series) and switches, the NetScreen firewall, the Sonus softswitch, and over two dozen forwarding engines for Cisco and Juniper.

What is NetDevices' target customer base?
NetDevices serves medium to large-sized enterprises with large branch and regional offices as well as managed service providers.

What is the current state of branch office networking technology?
There are currently two approaches to branch office networking; the traditional approach employs multiple point devices for each function, while a newer approach consolidates multiple independent service appliances into one system that offers little in the way of economies of scale, cost, processing, or management.

Consolidated systems pose several problems. When packets enter such a system, each service processes them for packet classification and inspection, just as if they were passing through multiple independent appliances. The more services, the greater the processing load and the less efficient the system becomes.

The architecture of consolidated networking systems places the management function on top of services, rather making it an underlying foundation, thus directly tying the ability to manage services to the availability of the underlying service devices. If a device's hardware or software is unreachable, inoperable, or otherwise unavailable, the management function is not available either-and both reliability and remote manageability suffer. And because the software of consolidated systems is not modular, if any one service such as VPN or firewall goes down, the entire system is unavailable.

Adding new services to consolidated systems is also difficult. The more services added, the more complex and difficult it becomes to ensure optimal performance of each service. In addition, latency increases and scalability degrades because each new service requires significant additional processing.

As the availability of remote offices becomes more crucial to enterprises, the shortcomings of today's point and consolidated systems become more glaring-and less acceptable.

What are NetDevices' primary differentiators?
NetDevices built its Unified Services Gateway from the ground up to reduce complexity, unify multiple services, and optimize network performance. The company's unique OnePass capability for packet classification and inspection classifies incoming packets only once, in a single pass. Once classified, packets are processed only through the appropriate services, minimizing latency and making it easy to add new services.

In addition, NetDevices developed a unique "always live" architecture that guarantees availability, accessibility, manageability, and reliability of all network services at all times. ModuLive™ has an open, flexible, modular architecture that is divided into a data plane, a control plane, and for the first time, a management plane. The enterprise can troubleshoot failed system elements and change, start, stop, or add services without disrupting network operation.

The Lifeline™ dedicated management framework provides the industry's highest level of always-available system access and significantly reduces management cost. All services are completely accessible, deployable, and manageable from a central location, even when other portions of the Unified Services Gateway are not available.

How will customers benefit from a Unified Services Gateway?
Enterprises are becoming more decentralized, and large branch and regional offices are becoming ever more important to enterprise operations. IT departments are now tasked with providing sophisticated, enterprise-level networking services such as security and VoIP across the organization, while still sticking to a strict budget.

NetDevices' Unified Services Gateway offers all of the enterprise-level services that branch offices need today, and its unified, modular architecture makes it easy to add new services in the future, without disrupting existing services. The independent management framework ensures that IT can manage all services from a central location and helps ensure maximum system availability by enabling remote troubleshooting, regardless of the status of the main system processor or control plane. And because NetDevices' solution is truly unified, it is more cost effective and requires less shelf space than consolidated systems.

How does NetDevices plan to bring its products to market?
NetDevices sells directly to carriers interested in deploying managed services for branch office networking, as well as to enterprises through a sophisticated global channel program.

Does NetDevices have any customers already in place?
NetDevices has multiple customers worldwide in North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe.

How is NetDevices funded and by whom?
NetDevices is well funded by leading capital firms including ComVentures, Artiman Ventures, Columbia Capital, and JumpStartup.