Aventail looks to best IPSec VPN vendors

Aventail has sold Secure Sockets Layer-based remote-access equipment and services for roughly six years, longer than most of its competitors. Now that the technology really seems to be catching on, the company is looking to capitalize on its head start. CEO Evan Kaplan recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about where the company and market are headed.

How do Aventail's offerings stack up against IP Security [IPSec] VPN remote-access products?

We are the first SSL VPN to be a true, comprehensive IPSec [remote-access] replacement.

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Aventail has sold Secure Sockets Layer-based remote-access equipment and services for roughly six years, longer than most of its competitors. Now that the technology really seems to be catching on, the company is looking to capitalize on its head start. CEO Evan Kaplan recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about where the company and market are headed.

How do Aventail's offerings stack up against IP Security [IPSec] VPN remote-access products?

We are the first SSL VPN to be a true, comprehensive IPSec [remote-access] replacement.

How does your gear actually match up vs. IPSec remote access?

[With IPSec, a remote PC has client software that creates an encrypted tunnel across the Internet to a VPN server, granting direct access to all the network resources behind the server.] We can take an application like Outlook and rerender it into a Web page. Or [do the same with] a standard SAP client. We can take a [Server Message Block] file system and render that into a Web-based interface that will give you whole SMB file access. We have a Java local listener that allows you to handle basically any client-server app that happened to be resident on a PC.

So you could go home without actually deploying a client and use your full Outlook client or Exchange, or you could use a SAP client that could be deployed on the desktop. You could do Windows terminal services.

And then you go to proxy-based VPNs, which are basically the full replacement of an IPSec solution, with a very simple agent as opposed to a full client.

You can beat out IPSec remote access today with your offerings?