Denise Dubie
Senior Editor

Interop start-ups take on network security, management and acceleration

News
Apr 30, 20083 mins

Start-up City vendors showcase products to secure ports, manage services and accelerate file transfers.

Blue Spinner, FastSoft, porttracker and Solera Networks use Interop’s Start-up City to showcase their products to attendees.

LAS VEGAS — Interop inspires industry veterans and newcomers alike to put on display their most innovative products, hoping to catch the eye of network managers with IT problems to solve.

While established vendors splurge on big booths, some younger vendors set up shop in Interop’s Start-up City to showcase their technologies and tools. This year the handful of residents ranged from newbies such as Blue Spinner to more familiar names such as open source router maker Vyatta. 

Solera Networks President and CEO Steve Shillingford says this is his company’s second stay in Start-up City because Interop draws target customers and peers with the best knowledge of this industry. “Interop offers us a chance to be a part of a lot of thought leadership in security, management and networking,” he says.

Here are details on five residents of this year’s Start-up City:

Company: Blue Spinner 2008 Phoenix Dutch Kaplan, president Blue Spinner offers a Web-based incident management system to customers via a software-as-a-service delivery model. The company says its product includes built-in workflow, document control and change management features, and can be used as a help desk, incident tracking or customer service system, depending on the customer environment. The subscription service, also called Blue Spinner, has been used by a Fortune 500 company for the past two years and now the company is making it available to others. Pricing is based on a per-user basis.

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Company: FastSoft 2005 Pasedena, Calif. Steven Low, co-founder, chairman and CEO FastSoft’s E-Series of Accelerators use the company’s FastSCP technology to ensure components inherent in TCP don’t slow down file transfers. The company employs a single-appliance model — meaning customers need only install an appliance on one end of a WAN connection — and FastSCP gets around TCP’s packet loss limitations to reduce latency over wide areas. Company officials say the technology can speed transfers up to 30 times, depending on network connections. Pricing for the E-Series appliance starts at $10,000.(Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products.)

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Company: porttracker 2007 Basingstoke, U.K. Julian Rigg, CEO Porttracker packages its network management software of the same name on a plug-and-play appliance that enables network managers to quickly track and report on what is connected to the network for troubleshooting, security and capacity planning purposes. The product builds a view of the switch-port inventory and is designed for companies with more than 1,000 ports to manage. Porttracker is available for sale, starting at about $10,000, through n3k Informatik Limited. (Compare Network Monitoring and Management products.)

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Company: Solera Networks 2005 Linden, Utah Steve Shillingford, president and CEO The DS series Packet Capture Appliances conduct continuous deep-packet capture and stream-to-storage for 100% of network traffic collected. The device can capture, archive, filter and regenerate network traffic data at full-line rates and offers a play-back feature that enables network managers to analyze traffic for troubleshooting, security, compliance and other purposes. Pricing for DS series appliances starts at about $10,000. (Compare Network Monitoring and Management products.)

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Company: Vyatta 2005 Belmont, Calif. Kelly Herrell, CEO Vyatta developed open source routing software based on Linux that competes with commercial offerings from Cisco. The software combines firewall, IPSec VPN, multi-link Point-to-Point Protocol and Border Gateway Protocol scaling. The Vyatta Communication Edition open source router is free of charge; Vyatta does charge a fee for support packages. (Compare Enterprise Core Router products.)

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Denise Dubie

Denise Dubie is a senior editor at Network World with nearly 30 years of experience writing about the tech industry. Her coverage areas include AIOps, cybersecurity, networking careers, network management, observability, SASE, SD-WAN, and how AI transforms enterprise IT. A seasoned journalist and content creator, Denise writes breaking news and in-depth features, and she delivers practical advice for IT professionals while making complex technology accessible to all. Before returning to journalism, she held senior content marketing roles at CA Technologies, Berkshire Grey, and Cisco. Denise is a trusted voice in the world of enterprise IT and networking.

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