Background
Ukiah Software, Inc., a privately held company based in Campbell (USA), is a developer of Internet and intranet software security products. The company’s mission is to develop and deliver easily managed solutions for secure information access over the Internet and intranet in environments requiring multi-platform and multi-protocol support. Ukiah is the only company offering advanced firewall products for heterogeneous Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) environments, running on NetWare and on Windows NT. NetRoad FireWALL is National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana-Champaign (NCSA), IL, certified.
TCP/IP standard Internet communications protocols allow digital computers to communicate over long distances. The Internet is a packet-switched network, in which information is broken down into small packets, sent individually over many different routes at the same time and then reassembled at the receiving end. TCP is the component that collects and reassembles the packets of data, while IP is responsible for making sure that the packets are sent to the right destination. TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s and adopted as the protocol standard for ARPANET (the predecessor to the Internet) in 1983.
Software Ukiah of Promoter
Naveen Bisht, promoter of Ukiah Software, holds an MS from Texas Tech University and B.E. from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. He also attended a Ph.D. programme at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has to his credit a number of patents in the area of quality-of-service and security management in IP networks. He has published a number of papers on the trends and issues in the networking industry in leading journals. He is also a co-founder of and managing partner for Luxmi Ventures. As a successful technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, he brings expertise in launching, developing and investing in high-technology companies across multiple industries. He has over 18 years of rich and diversified experience in the area of high-growth technology and services sectors, including cross-border team building and management, operations, business/product development, mergers and acquisitions, turnarounds, start-ups strategic advisory services and strategic planning and negotiation skills.
Luxmi Ventures, LLC, is a seed-stage angel fund that focuses on funding in the areas of networking, Internet, software and services market. Recently, he founded another company, Nayna Networks, Inc., a networking solutions and service provider company, where he was responsible for the overall strategic direction for the company. He founded Ukiah Software, Inc., a company which is a leader in policy-based bandwidth and security management software systems for service provider and enterprise networks. He occupied the position of President and CEO of Ukiah since its inception till its acquisition by Novell, Inc., in 1999. Ukiah received a large number of awards, including ‘Top 10 Companies to Watch’ given in 1999 by Network World; ‘Top 25 Hot Start-ups of 1998’ given by Data Communications Magazine in 1999; ‘Hot Product Awards’ given by Data Communications Magazine in 1998; ‘Product of the Month Award’ given by Telecommunications Magazine; and ‘Network World’s Blue Ribbon Award’ in 1999. Earlier, he was the founder and president of NeoGlobal, Inc., a software consulting services company that has a specialty in the area of Internet, enterprise software and networking market.
Cycle Development Product
The product development cycle in such an industry as Ukiah Software, Inc . involved an initial idea to build a gateway product to provide Internet access to a huge installbase of Novell Netware (approx. 60M users; 4–5M servers (1995–96 timeframe)). An idea was evolved using the same technology, feedback from customers and VCs. The company had developed a hot product of the year, Hot Start-up in 1998, which was sold to Novell, Inc. (1999).
The key ingredients in such an industry are a smart and talented technical lean team that needs to be backed up by very good marketing team efforts, private investors to have confidence in the future prospects of the products and good timing to come up with new products in the market compared with competitors. This is evident from Ukiah Software’ s efforts for developing a new product in nine months from the start of the company and coming up with new products every year in the domain expertise of the company to cater to customer needs. This has resulted in internal strengths of the company that led to it being sold at a premium within three years of inception. The company raised bootstrap funding without depending on any other outside money
The fundamental strategy of the venture revolved around customers to attract good projects and deploy appropriate talented engineers, to ensure delivery of the solutions within typical timeframe. The revenue stream started immediately after starting or so to say from the initial phase of launching the venture itself.
Firewall NetRoad of Features Key
This product is two products in one: an IP firewall and an IPX/IP gateway. Therefore, it allows providing secure Internet or intranet access to both IP and IPX networks (or any combination of the two). Some of the key features are full application-level security for all the key IP protocols, such as HTTP, Telnet, FTP, SMTP and more! No one can hack into your Web server with NetRoad Firewall standing guard! It provides full bi-directional control over network traffic, both inbound and outbound. This enables you not only to keep hackers out but also to keep your users from checking out some of those information ‘resources’ on the network you would rather they stayed away from!
The product provides a full support for IP clients, irrespective of their operating system. With its integrated support for NAT (network address translation), there is no need for making any changes in the network address. The company provides full support to its IPX clients as by using the IPX/ IP gateway component, users can run any TCP or UDP application on IPX clients. Above all, the product is integrated with Novell Directory Services (NDS): NetRoad Firewall and thus appears as just another object in users NDS tree, and is configured and managed through an NWADMIN snap-in. Thus, users can take full advantage of their NDS database and groups without having to re-enter all this information again. Security events are logged with NDS. User authentication is handled through NDS.
NewsServer NetRoad
This is a product that allows you to provide full NNTP-compliant news service to your users. And on NetWare! Therefore, instead of having to go out to the Internet to access newsgroup messages, the network administrator configures your own private NetWare-based NewsServer to download the newsgroups that you and your organization’s users are interested in. As these newsgroups are stored locally on your LAN, access to this information is much faster than over slow WAN links. You can also maintain purely private newsgroups. Therefore, it is a secured as well as fast way to disseminate information
As it is NNTP compliant, this works with any standard newsreader, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. It enables access to both selective newsfeeds and comprehensive newsfeeds. Thus, it enables the user to get the newsgroups that your organization needs. It can be configured to delete old messages, which ensures that the disk space requirement stays under control. Above all, it is the fastest news server on the market because of high-performance implementation.
NetRoad TrafficWare is a software-based bandwidth management solution that enables administrators to control network services on the basis of priorities, user-definable bandwidth levels and rules for admitting network sessions. TrafficWare is a tool that prioritizes various network traffic using different variables, including source and destination, network application, time of the day and URLs. The outcome ensures that important traffic goes where it needs to go more quickly than less important traffic. According to Gordon Smith, Ukiah vice president (marketing), a major problem and performance bottleneck occurs when users combine private LANs or enterprise networks, which are pretty fast, with that of slower Internet. As such, when you cannot increase the throughput, you have to manage the bandwidth you can get most effectively, which is the approach used here. It is a software-based bandwidth management solution that enables administrators to control network services on the basis of priorities, user-definable bandwidth levels and rules for admitting network sessions.
Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVL) announced its acquisition of Ukiah Software, Inc., a privately held developer of policy-based network management software based in Campbell, California, in June 1999. Ukiah’s technology has been interwoven and works with directory software such as Novell Directory Services (NDS) to enable businesses to establish rules, or ‘policies’, to automate the management of traffic and quality-of-service across information networks. This enables businesses to optimize their investment in network infrastructure such as routers and switches by allocating bandwidth to critical applications or users involved in critical tasks. Novell, because of its market reach and technology, has the resources to bring Ukiah’s policy management technology to an even broader community of customers. Novell also has a great advantage in terms of worldwide channel, consulting, developer, education and technical support programmes that are the most extensive in the network computing industry.1,2
1. What have been the key success factors for Ukiah Software, Inc. ?
2. What is the importance of research and development efforts in developing network solutions?
3. What are the key entry barriers to development of high-technology new products, in general, and Internet and intranet software security products, in particular?
4. Was it right on the part of Naveen Bisht to sell Ukiah Software, Inc. to Novell, Inc.? Justify your answer.