Legend has it that the Rana of Mewar, Kumbha never lost a battle even when confronted with the toughest of adversaries. He built a number of formidable fortresses all over Rajasthan that proved to be of great strategic importance to Mewar. While his warriors valiantly staved off the Mughal onslaught, Kumbha knew warring alone wasn’t going to be enough. Pushing his laborers to build—even as grain and fodder reserves dwindled—the fortresses and city walls, Kumbha embedded his beloved cities with deep security measures that stood the later rulers of Mewar in good stead.

Sathyan Iyengar looks at today’s Internet security needs in the same light. “Security breaches are a given in today’s connected environment. Building security solutions based on stacks and protocols from either open resources or otherwise is simply not enough and is risky,” says the CEO of the Santa Clara, CA-based Intoto, a security software firm that focuses on the embedded platform. “The demand for more integrated solutions embedded within the gateways is probably a sign of where the security space is evolving.”

When Iyengar co-founded Intoto in 1998 along with Murthy Chinthalapati, the interest levels in the embedded markets were high, prompting the duo to focus on creating solutions for this market. For a while, the startup worked on software for the connectivity market—USB, 1394, PCMCI and so on, but very quickly realized that the network security space was the obvious pain area. “Network gateways were becoming common, within which security functions were embedded,” recalls Iyengar, “where we noticed that simply building stacks and protocols were insufficient.” Enabling the gateways with security functionality proved a sound strategy, especially in the consumer communication devices. Unlike proprietary or own implementations that are resource-intensive, and public source code that face community source and legal issues, Intoto products are complete turnkey solutions that are integrated, certified, and interoperable. “Today’s markets demand that vendors have very short product lifecycles, requiring much more rapid time-to-market,” says Iyengar. “In order to accomplish this, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) are turning to software ODMs, like Intoto, to maintain product leadership, reduce development costs, and speed time-to-market for faster return on investment and increased market share.”

As convergence drives integration of data, voice, video, and wireless, Intoto is building out suites of turnkey embedded software platforms that ensure security and include voice & wireless technologies targeted at ODM/OEM manufacturers of residential gateways, DSL/cable modems, wireless access points, security appliances, and IADs. The flagship product—iGateway—meets unique enterprise and consumer market demands. The iGateway RGS and ParentalCQ software platforms for residential and business gateways is designed around consumer needs—basic networking protocols, WLAN support, Firewall, VoIP, and IPsec VPN, where the ParentalCQ facilitates advanced Web content control, filtering, and monitoring. Intoto’s iGateway EX and IntruPro IPS software platforms deliver robust product features to address the demanding requirements of enterprise-class networks. These platforms are comprehensive security, voice, and wireless solutions for enterprise security appliances, network gateways, and IAD/ICPs. “We have supplied solutions for a client who required a 100,000 tunnels for the VPN—we had no trouble at all,” recalls Iyengar.
Intoto’s Inline IPS technology is based on intrusion detection techniques that use a proprietary application-aware architecture, reducing false positives to near zero. The Inline IPS architecture leverages the benefits of both a signature based techniques and anomaly based detection, and the application intelligence enables classification of traffic based on state, service and direction. Packet processing load is minimized because only relevant rules are checked. This dramatically boosts the performance of the intrusion prevention system over the traditional pattern matching/anomaly correlation techniques.

In recent wins, Intoto lists a growing client base, including Adtran, Cybertan, DLink, HIFN, Netgear, Nuera, SOHOware, Symbol, Zcom and others. Earlier this year, Iyengar announced a $11m round of funding from AsiaTech and a corporate partner, fueling the startup’s growth plans. “The technology is robust enough to scale across platform needs, and the interoperability makes it suitable for adoption, given that our customers have products that range from $99 and less to over $10,000 per SKU. In this situation, we needed to be adaptable to the product requirements, and yet match the client budgets,” says Iyengar.

With a fully operational development center in Hyderabad since inception, Intoto has managed to keep overheads to survivable figures. The company has opened another center in Chennai and is planning to add 15-20 people to the team strength by the year end. “We are possibly the first security firm to use the offshore model in 1998-99,” recalls the CEO. “Enterprise gateways require high-performance security and routing features that support business-class applications such as server hosting, video-conferencing, and sophisticated routing schemes,” says Jeff Wilson, senior analyst with Infonetics Research. “Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are often challenged to produce these types of next-generation broadband equipment within timeframes that are too difficult to meet with internal resources. Full-service software makers like Intoto enable them to keep pace with technological innovation and convergence by supplying completely integrated software platforms.”

With a recently-won the ICSA Labs certification for its VPN software, Iyengar is quietly shoring up industry reputation for Intoto. “As a company, we have achieved our business model goals—deliver embedded communication software solutions, intoto,” smiles the CEO, who reached profitability this year. “We need to remain agile now.” Totally!