The Sidewinder G2 Security Appliance range will be based on the Sidewinder G2 6.1 software, which will be generally available this month, as well as optional modules provided by Secure or by third parties.

The move captures Secure’s take on two of the latest related trends to hit the firewall market – the move to a combination of perimeter security functions into single units, and the move to appliances, which can provide the performance to handle such complexity.

As well as Secure’s own firewall/VPN and optional URL filtering software, the devices will ship with anti-virus from Network Associates Inc, anti-spam from Cloudmark Inc, and SSL features from Cavium Inc, director of product marketing Paul DeBernardi said.

Each of these features can be turned on separately via a software key. CEO John McNulty said in a conference call yesterday that if all four options are turned on, it essentially doubles the amount of revenue Secure would receive.

Pricing for the appliances starts at $2,500 for the low-end small business or branch office devices, and starts at $70,000 for the high-end devices. DeBernardi said that, if clustered, the high-end boxes will be able to reach multi-gigabit speeds.

Secure also announced its fourth-quarter financial results. For the three months to December 31, net income was up 57% at $4.1m, on revenue that was up 33% at $2.9m. For the year, net income was $9.3m, compared to a $5.2m loss, on revenue up 23% at $76.2m.

The firm has announced its intention to go to a 90% channel distribution model, and the move to appliances should encourage that to be successful, DeBernardi said. McNulty said the firm can experience gross margins well north of 80% selling appliances.

Secure reckons its experience trying to get its hybrid application firewalls to scale and perform well will benefit it, as the perimeter security industry all moves to cram more functionality onto single platforms.

Other commodity firewall vendors are struggling to scale application filtering with use or proxies or filters to deal with issue of application layer firewall security, McNulty said during yesterday’s earnings conference call.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire