Shiva Corp, the remote access specialist that reported an $8.4m loss for the first quarter this year, compared to a $4.3m profit last time, is beset with further difficulties, facing two class action suits. These suits allege Shiva inflated its stock price by misrepresenting the strength of its technology (CI No 3,182). Colin Farquhar, product marketing manager LANRover PowerUP, claims the losses were due to over-production. He refuses to elaborate on rumors that Shiva is about to be cherry-picked by its technology partner, Northern Telecom Ltd, or that it is up for take-over by any acquisitive predator. He said: It is company policy not to comment on issues that may affect our share price. Shiva hopes its new product range will see it out of the woods and back into profitability by exploiting a lucrative niche at the low-end of the market. Its LANRover PowerBase, a low-end 8-port remote access server, shipping now at $3,680, supports Basic Rate ISDN and 56Kbps Rockwell/Lucent KFLEX cards. By reducing the feature set, Shiva claims prices could fall by up to 40%. The basic package supports IP/IPX, STAC compression, Point- to-Point protocol, PAP, CHAP and SPAP security standards, all bundled with the ShivaRemote Windows 95 dial-in client. Extra features come with three software upgrade kits, costing $740 a piece, providing extra security, performance and multi-protocol support.