Neoteris debuts appliances for securing online meetings

Computerworld - Neoteris Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., announced today a family of appliances to help companies provide secure online meetings.
Neoteris Meeting Series will debut late this month as a software upgrade to the Neoteris Instant Virtual Externet (IVE) Access Series product line and will appear as a stand-alone appliance late this year, Neoteris officials said.
It will be the first appliance to apply Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) technology to online meetings, said Dave Kosiur, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah.
The SSL VPN market is saturated with companies offering software or services to provide security, Kosiur said. "The SSL VPN market has grown in the last year, and everybody is coming out of the woodwork to offer some kind of SSL VPN," Kosiur said.
Kosiur said the appliance for online meetings is a narrow slice of the potential market for all SSL VPN services and products, but will find uses in large companies that conduct many online meetings where documents and slides are shared with whiteboard functions between business partners and branch offices. Still, Kosiur said, "I don't know how far Neoteris can go with this product."
A beta version of Meeting Series 3000 has successfully been tested for use by up to 650 attorneys in nine branch offices nationwide of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, said Adam Hansen, lead information security engineer at the Chicago-based law firm.
Hansen said he sees Meeting Series as a cost-effective replacement for paying for the online meeting services of WebEx Communications Inc. in San Jose. WebEx costs about 25 cents per minute for connected users, resulting in an annual cost of about $68,000, and the number is expected to grow as more lawyers use the service, Hansen said.
By comparison, installing the Meeting Series 3000 will cost about $30,000, and lawyers will administer the service themselves. "Meeting Series is an extremely wise investment," Hansen said.
In a law firm, online meeting security "is extremely important," and Neoteris seems completely trustworthy "partly just because I own it," he said. By comparison, Hansen said he always worries who might be online but hidden with a WebEx online conference. "Out of 20 users in various places, 17 could be our attorneys and two could be business partners who brought a third person I don't know," he said. But identity management of such a party would be easier with a product he controls, he said.
Neoteris is offering Meeting Series functionality as a software upgrade to its IVE Access Series family startingat $1,995. Meeting Series appliances will ship late in the year starting at $14,995.