Nortel veteran to head AirDefense

A 19-year veteran of network giant Nortel has been named president and CEO of a small WLAN security software company.

Anil Khatod will take the helm of AirDefense, taking over for co-founder Jay Chaudhry in these posts. Chaudhry remains the company's chairman.

Khatod most recently was a principal of Atlas Venture, a Waltham, Mass., venture fund. Previously, he was a senior executive at Nortel Networks, where he held an array of senior posts, his last one being chief marketing and strategy officer.

As president of Nortel’s optical Internet division, Khatod oversaw revenue growth from $580 million to $10 billion in yearly sales.

Even $580 million is a far cry from current sales for the privately held AirDefense, founded in 2001 to create software for monitoring. The company claims to have 125 enterprise customers of its radio sensors, server appliances and detection and monitoring software. The sensors, among other things, can detect rogue access points and shut them down.

An array of WLAN companies, most recently Aruba Networks, are adding various wireless intrusion detection features to their switches or access points. AirDefense for some months has been positioning itself as a complete system for monitoring a corporate WLAN not only for security but also for administration. The company recently beefed up the software's ability centrally to set up and administer a range of WLAN policies.

Khatod faces the challenge of maintaining the company's technical edge while convincing enterprise, mid-range businesses and service providers that the AirDefense products easily can be added to existing WLANs to give administrators more visibility into what's happening on those nets.