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Zone Labs, the maker of the popular ZoneAlarm personal firewall product, and Imperito Networks, the VPN solutions company, have entered into a joint development initiative to integrate their products for sale to small and mid-size businesses.
A new product offering from Imperito Networks will bundle its remote access VPN (virtual private network) with Zone Labs personal firewall solution. The new product is expected in the second quarter of this year, said Alonzo Ellis, CTO at Imperito Networks.
The agreement is non-exclusive for Zone Labs products, which partners with larger enterprise VPN solutions vendors as well.
Looking ahead, Ellis told eWeek, Imperito Networks is also working on a console for the administrator to easily manage the deployment and policies of all firewalls and VPNs together.
This is a natural, bundled follow-up to Zone Labs recent Integrity product, which focused on remote management of personal firewalls, he said.
“For example, from a single console, a single user or customer will be able to manage all the VPN and personal firewall policies … either via Imperito or via Zone [client],” said Ellis. “And in addition to that, to add some intelligence so the system has the ability to respond to alerts automatically.”
Most end-users dont deal effectively with the pop-up warnings about suspicious packets that come into the personal computer.
“Were going to take it from that to capturing the alert information and then sending that back to an intelligent engine that would decide, either on behalf of the administrator to make changes to policy for personal firewalls, VPNs, or both, or, would alert the administrator and allow the administrator to make a system-wide change with one click of the mouse,” he said.
The new product, Ellis said, should be available by the fourth quarter of this year.