The Palo Alto, California-based company is best known for its RFprotect Distributed product, which is a traditional server-plus-sensors offering like those of its competitors AirDefense, AirMagnet and AirTight. It originally went to market through OEM agreements, and while Distributed is still OEMed by a number of WLAN infrastructure vendors, since 2004 the company has been selling under its own brand too, and today the bulk of its revenue comes from own-brand sales, according to CTO Chris Waters.
Since Distributed, which was launched in 2003, NetChem has added three other product lines, namely Mobile, unveiled in 2004, RFprotect Endpoint, in 2005 and, at the beginning of this year, Network Chemistry Scanner.
Mobile is a portable product that loads onto a laptop and has both the sensor and the server capability on board and so can operate as a standalone product, or report back to a central server if there is one in the network. It costs $3,999 and comes with a WiFi card for the laptop, so all the customer has to do in order to take advantage of the GPS facility is provision a GPS dongle with the chip in it, which they can plug into the USB port on the laptop, said Waters. Then rogue devices can be located on a site plan, street map or satellite image.
He described Endpoint as a connection policy enforcement tool, with no ambitions to offer complete endpoint protection in the manner of Symantec’s Sygate technology or any of a host of NAC offerings in the market. What it does, however, is to enforce policies such as, if an employee is coming onto a corporate network over a WiFi link from a coffee shop, it can force the link to go through a VPN.
Scanner, which Waters said represents the future of NetChem, is a device that sits on a wired network and, without needing wireless sensors, discovers any APs in its environment.
Part of what it does relies on an open source project called RogueScanner, which we released in May 2006 as a community effort to build a database of all the APs every released, including the ones that are no longer available to buy, he went on. That database is hosted in the Cloud by NetChem, and can be freely used by anyone coming to it from the internet. Meanwhile it also resides on the Scanner appliance and is the basis for its device classification decisions.
Scanner has two models, one called the NS3000 which is a central server to scan large networks, with a list price of $14,995 for support of up to 500 nodes, the other called the NS800, which can be deployed on the network of a subsidiary in another company, carry out all the scanning and report back to an NS3000 at HQ.
Not that NetChem expects its entire business to go over to the Scanner.
