"We will focus on products business after services sell-off"

SSL VPN major Aventail Corp. sold off its managed services business to
Netifice Communications in March this year, and is at present focusing on its
products. While the size of the deal remained undisclosed, Netifice reportedly
raised $55 million in financing to fund the acquisition of the Aventail business
unit. Prior to the deal, Aventail was deriving more than 60 percent of its
revenues from services. Chris Hopen, CTO and co-founder of Aventail Corp., in an
interview with CyberMedia News throws some light on the rationale behind the
sell-off and the company's growth prospects moving forward.

Can you explain the rationale behind Aventail's decision to sell off its
services business?

If you look at the managed services business, a certain percentage of
security services are bought through service providers while the rest are
products that are run, operated and managed. Our goal of being in the managed
services space was to leverage on the services and solutions so that we could
get Aventail into more markets. The service was successful in taking what we had
and giving it to service providers and letting the SPs generate SSL VPN-based
revenues. We did the deployment fast and that was a good value proposition to
managed services providers.

Netifice recognized our asset and felt like they needed our managed services
business to grow their company. We weren't trying to sell the business since
it was successful and profitable. But they made us an offer that we couldn't
refuse.

Nothing has changed on the products side of the business. What has come with
this sale is a long-term agreement for at least three to four years with
Netifice. We will provide them with hardware, software and consulting.

Was the move also considered because of the multi-vendor nature of the
services business?

Yes. SPs are not necessarily measured on technology and functional portfolio
but on services. Those who want to buy from SPs want to buy firewall services,
or dial-up services bundled with the services. These are services components
that we did not want to invest in. But Netifice is into this and it is part of
their services portfolio. So they have a multi-vendor solutions management. We
realized this asset could be even more valuable in the hands of a better service
operator.

How does Aventail's Indian center fit into the company's overall
scenario?

We built the Aventail team back in September 2003 for product and technology
development. As we ramped up on development, we also grew the team to include QA
and testing. About 90 percent of the entire QA for our products is done here. We've
tried to build a set-up in India that mirrors that in the US.

We have 50 people in India now. We are looking at India as a growth vehicle
to put more into products and get releases faster than our competition.

What new products and features are you focusing on?

We want to expand the product line both in terms of scale and capacity. We've
had a narrow footprint in terms of the product family so we want to introduce
low cost solutions and push them into the SME space. Besides, we also want to
grow into larger scale deployments. We are also working on high-density bladed
type appliances along with another hardware provider.

How do you compete with players who offer integrated SSL VPN and IP Sec
solution?

People who sell end-user based IP Sec solution have included SSL-VPN because
they sensed the threat from the SSL VPN space. However, if you look at the
functional part of their products, they don't replace the IP Sec part of the
product because they don't want to cannibalize that part of their business.
The breadth and the type of access we provide with our platform have always
included IP Sec-like access.

Priya Padmanabhan