point
Menu
Magazines
Browse by year:
May - 2014 - issue > Cover Story
TeamF1 Future-Proofing the Connectivity and Security Roadmap for Smart Devices
Sagaya Christuraj
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
The buzz around the Internet of Things (IoT) tends to center around a set of highly functional, utilitarian ideas: connected objects can make smart homes a reality, where toasters will talk to alarm clocks so your toast is ready when you awaken, and smart refrigerators will know when you are out of yogurt and perhaps even place an online grocery order directly. Seemingly far-fetched applications, once only the stuff of science-fiction movies, such as turning an environment into ambient data visualization, where the hue of your lamp reflects your stock portfolio’s performance or optimizing health habits by checking body activity through your bracelet's color, are now being ushered into the realm of reality, thanks to the pervasiveness of connected smart devices.

As more devices and the environment they operate in, become actuated, connected, and data-enabled, these "enchanted" objects are developing the capacity to contain their own stories. An object can remember its history, understand how it is used, and talk to other objects around it to understand its environment. As these capabilities evolve, these devices no longer become inert backdrops to our experiences, but active participants in our world that can share stories about themselves and us. The key to all this is data connectivity between these devices, and by extension to the omnipresent and ubiquitous internet "cloud".

The entry/exit point for data into homes, which are becoming smarter and more connected, is an internet gateway device. This traffic cop of peripatetic data, connects to, and often manages & controls a smorgasbord of devices within the home on one side, and interfaces with the rest of the world through connections to the Internet on the other side. Advanced connectivity technologies for such a critical “junction” or “hub” are not just an option but a core requirement -- and because of the nature of the information it carries, security is integral to its design. With everyone now expecting to be connected everywhere, and with the all-pervasiveness of the cloud, a company named TeamF1, which provides high-performance networking and security software for these smart internet gateway devices has honed in on an audacious vision of a world where embedded smart appliances everywhere are reachable – and not just reachable, but securely reachable - from anywhere through their gateways, whether the internet connection be through broadband or fiber optic lines, whether DSL or cable, whether 3G or 4G/LTE.

Hurtling Down the Network Speedway

Founded in Fremont, California in 1998 by performance car racing fans and college buddies Mukesh Lulla and Vinai Kolli, TeamF1, Inc. is a privately-held preeminent supplier of turnkey software solutions for the embedded systems market.

TeamF1 specializes in customization of its highly configurable software products which are then licensed to customers as turnkey production-ready solutions. This leverages their clients' core competencies by letting them focus on product and feature definition while TeamF1's combination of field-validated standard software components and customization services help bring the end-product to market faster, and in a low-risk/low-cost way. TeamF1 software is used by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in projects requiring the latest in telecommunications and networking technologies such as manufacturers of internet appliances, broadband access devices, aerospace/defense equipment and real time applications for industrial automation and control systems. Its many happy customers pay licensing fees for the use of these technologies when their product ships and is successful in the market – a shared-risk, shared-reward arrangement that aligns the goals of the company with those of its customers.

The business model may be simple and attractive; but enabling the embedded "security" on a chip requires complex algorithms requiring seamless integration of hardware and software to get maximum performance from the native chip functionality. This performance-focused approach is the raison d'être for TeamF1 - what it thrives on, and what its customers appreciate. It is, thus, no wonder that TeamF1’s software is an integral part of networking devices developed by most Tier-1 networking equipment providers today.

While TeamF1 has proven to be a leader in delivering embedded networking and security products for the Internet infrastructure since its early years, lately, the company has expanded into new areas that play to its strengths. It has taken the robust flexibility that it brought to business-class devices and brought it home, so to speak, powering a wide variety of smart consumer residential devices as well.

Springboarding from its proven credibility in meeting the demands of local area networks (LANs) of secure enterprises, it has extended its reach into home area networks (HANs) –those that include a wide variety of smart devices inside a home. Such HANs are commonly managed not just by advanced consumers (the so-called "prosumers"), but also by service providers looking to provide more than just an internet connection "pipe". TeamF1's smart gateway devices enable value-added services beyond just an internet connection, such as home monitoring, surveillance & security, energy management, lighting control and all the other technological goodness that every smart home worth its salt would require, all managed seamlessly through the cloud.

Life in the IoT Fast Lane

The late great legend of Formula One Racing, Ayrton Senna once said, "I am not designed to come second or third. I am designed to win". Since its inception, the founders of TeamF1 strived to be number one in the industry and nothing less. As Mukesh, TeamF1's CEO, says, with a mischievous somber tone to his voice, obviously alluding to a different type of race, "If you ain't the lead dog, the view never changes!"
And sure enough, TeamF1's software has been at the forefront of the market in applications ranging from business security gateways, UTM firewalls and network storage devices, which it has now expanded to home gateways and service provider routers. "With more efficient software development techniques, our offerings encompass the breadth of requirements for securely connecting devices: from high-performance routing stacks, hardware-accelerated security protocols to intuitive device management. We offer a complete and customizable OEM-focused security and availability platform that can protect our customers’ legacy systems and be the cornerstone of their next generation ones”, adds Mukesh. As the needs of home networks grow more sophisticated, TeamF1's customizable software model scales very well, bringing centralized and remotely manageable control for every smart device in the home.

Another quality of Senna that seems to have inspired the TeamF1 founders is that of taking calculated risks, especially when the odds are stacked up against them. The two gentlemen from TeamF1 have dared to step into unchartered territory and establish themselves in other verticals as well. The result of this is the company’s "production-ready" turnkey solutions powering wired and wireless devices world-wide not just for small and medium businesses and residential network connectivity, but also for connected devices for industrial, medical and defense use.

Maneuvering Around Chicanes

One unique aspect of TeamF1’s software is that it is built with strong security baked into its DNA, yet the company takes efforts to make it invisible, so that it does not get in the way of the user. The key, the company’s CEO opines, is to design robust but simple-to-use products, so that the user doesn't need to work around the security measures, which can leading to more vulnerability in the system.
"The most common and easily understood example of this vulnerability is if a security system requires unreasonable password strength and hard to remember passwords that have to change too often, it becomes vulnerable to what I call the 'yellow sticky note' attack. The user starts writing it down and sticking it on his keyboard or monitor, thus introducing a serious vulnerability into a system that sounded very strong in theory" explains Mukesh.

But this is not just the company worshipping at the altar of abstract ideas of simplicity and elegance in user experience. As Mukesh goes on to add, "Just as important as our vision is our strategy that turns it into reality. In more than a decade of our company being around, we have played midwife to a lot of pioneering security and networking projects. We are focused, laser-like, on becoming the premier embedded connectivity & security company."

Thus, it has been an important part the company’s mission to make it easy for end-customers to use these leading-edge connectivity and security solutions. The firm’s credibility as a player whose software is already deployed on millions of devices for enterprise and small businesses gives it a sustainable competitive advantage, and the simple elegance of its solutions keeps its customers coming back for more.
While the company maneuvers around these chicanes of intricate cryptographic algorithms and makes security accessible for the end-user, it is not uncommon for it to be bombarded by another question – the use of open-source software. In spite of operating as a commercial venture, the company encourages the use of and even supports and sponsors several open-source projects. But for the embedded and device space in particular, after a lot of experimenting, the team arrived at the conclusion that with the exception of open-source projects for which there is a well-known, responsive user community supporting it -- Linux being a prime example -- only simpler protocols are ok to use as re-packaged open source. On the other hand, as protocols and use cases become more complex, combinations and interdependencies start to dominate or in some cases, need to leverage silicon-specific features. When this happens, it reaches an inflection point where the level of effort to integrate and “tailor” an unsupported open-source solution dominates and becomes a problem of its own. Hence, TeamF1 came up with what it calls its SecureF1rst framework which includes all the key technologies, including some “golden” open-source that fits neatly into the framework where it makes sense, which it uses to develop competitive products. And the company further brings to bear, its integration expertise to tailor the software to the needs of the target audience.

With this software architecture providing the scale to grow its technologies organically, starting with its flagship product "SecureF1rst Security Gateway Solution (SGS)" for small-and-medium business gateway devices, TeamF1 has steadily penetrated the home user market with its more recent "SecureF1rst CPE Gateway Solution (CGS)" offering, providing the seamless and secure experience today’s home users need. With the increasing need for security, the company plans on making significant inroads across various other market segments in the near future as well.

In the embedded world, the biggest competitors for software providers have traditionally been the customers themselves, since equipment vendors also develop home-grown software. But as software requirements get more complex, companies like TeamF1 are an attractive alternative. TeamF1's ability to offer a complete, customizable, security platform makes it a win-win for customers wanting to move away gracefully from home-grown software in existing legacy devices, to adopting rich new features that TeamF1 has to offer, in their new products.

TeamF1 licenses its solutions to customers in a form they call "customizable software". Once delivered to the customer, it is now "customized software" that is specific to that customer and by means of which they can differentiate their product in the market instead of competing only on price. The customer provides TeamF1 with their end-product requirements – a blueprint, according to which TeamF1 customizes its software and integrates the required modules. This model allows them to achieve economies-of-scale in software development, hence delivering the benefits of custom software with a much faster turnaround time and with relatively low costs, by avoiding the long time-to-market pitfalls of developing custom software from scratch. TeamF1 not only delivers the software solutions their customers need, they deliver these in a "production ready" state: ready to be sent straight to the manufacturing floor, ready for device end-users to use as-is, as soon as they open the box, so quality remains the top priority.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

The promise of an autonomous M2M (machine-to-machine) and IoT (Internet of Things) future and the efficiency it brings, for everything from electric power to healthcare delivery, cannot be fulfilled unless the hyper-connected vision of the future is joined at the hip with foundational security for the infrastructure and all "things" connected. Cisco Systems’ John Chambers, for example, said that the "Internet of Everything" will generate $19 trillion in new revenue by 2020: that is a whole lot of networked end-points that need to be secured! And we have not even touched on privacy yet, which remains a closely related but separate problem to be tackled.

By ensuring the secure connectivity of embedded devices, TeamF1 is doing its part in fashioning a future many have envisioned, and some have even skeptically shrugged off. If every passionate venture is driven by unflinching focus on a goal, TeamF1 is driven by the impetus reminiscent of a Formula One driver leading the race, who now sees the checkered flag in sight.

Even so, the TeamF1 founders are quite grounded in reality, more than their futuristic trade might let on - in keeping with their fondness for performance car racing, Mukesh and Vinai like to say, even now, more than a decade into the company's life, they feel that their engines are just getting revved up and they are shifting into gear for the bigger races to come. Well, we are thankful that they made this pit stop here at our publication and shared their insights with us, and we can’t wait to enjoy the fruits of TeamF1's work in the secure comfort of our smart homes as they zoom on by.
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
facebook