NetDevices comes out of hiding

Hoping to take advantage of the increasing number of customer premises devices required by enterprise users, Silicon Valley start-up NetDevices this week is unveiling its first product and proclaiming to unleash a new era in deployment and management simplicity.

The company’s first product, the SG-8 Unified Services Gateway, is designed to sit at the customer premises for large branch offices and act as a single gateway for all the end user’s networking needs. Among the broad categories the company is tackling are security, voice over IP, data services and access services. In the process, the company believes it is redefining an entire new product category.

Tim Waters, vice president of marketing and product management, who at one point in his career was vice president of data product management for Ameritech pointed to some issues in that role that would be solved by a business gateway.

“One of the things I managed was managed data services,” he said. “I had one box to do X, one box to do Y and one box to do Z. I always had to find a way to manage those devices and try not to roll a truck.”

Though targeting branch offices, NetDevices clearly is aiming at carriers as its major channel. Among the more prominent features of the gateway is the ability to remotely manage all services through a dedicated framework dubbed Lifeline.

“We constructed this purposely so that the carrier always will have visibility to the box,” Water said.

NetDevices, which is coming up on its two-year anniversary as a company, is trying to reclassify the service gateway market. Instead of building boxes for specific services, NetDevices is taking a broader approach by letting the service dictate the ultimate role of the box. That approach is taking hold throughout the industry and is expected to contribute to the leap in the business gateway market from $1.2 billion in 2004 to $16.6 billion by 2008, according to In-Stat.

“It’s really a confirmation that this notion of service gateways has really taken hold,” Waters said. “Gone will be the day where companies like Sears wants to put six boxes in any given location. And gone is the day when the carrier wants to manage that.”