Intoto makes $15m plans for India

Company to expand presence to Chennai, Bangalore, Pune

Santa Clara-based Intoto Inc, which is a provider of integrated security, wireless and voice software platforms, announced that it would be investing $15 million in its Indian operations over the next five years.

Intoto has already spent $6 million on its three-year-old development centre in the city. The company will set up additional testing facilities at the Hyderabad centre and expand its presence to three more cities "� Chennai, Bangalore and Pune.

The company will also ramp up the headcount in India from 120 to 160 and from 25 to 40 in the US by the year-end. It is also lining up five new products for launch by the end of the year.

Intoto provides integrated, secure and embedded gateway infrastructure software products to security, wireless and voice software for networking and communications equipment manufacturers, mainly in the US and Taiwan.

It has so far licensed its iGateway software solutions to over 100 networking and communications equipment vendors.

The iGateway platform includes security, convergence, connectivity and management solutions for security appliances and broadband networking equipment such as DSL, cable and wireless gateways, firewall and VPN appliances, integrated access devices, SOHO and residential gateways, access routers and multi-service switch gateway equipment.

Announcing the company's plans, its founder and CEO Sathyan Iyengar said that his company had recently secured venture funding to the extent of $11 million from Asia Tech Management and a corporate partner.

This funding would mainly go into rapidly expanding operations both in India and the US to improve profitability and accelerate market momentum, he said.

Explaining the importance of the Indian operations for the company, Iyengar said: "Intoto India is integral to our operations and we will continue to expand our operations in India. Intoto India has been responsible for the design, development and maintenance of all of Intoto's communication products. It also provides customer support for the customers in the Asia-Pacific region."

He also announced that the Hyderabad centre had moved into a 22,000 sq ft facility at Banjara Hills in the city to broader and scale up technical research and development teams.

It has also taken an international private leased line connectivity (IPLC) which would become operational next month.

Into India chief operating officer S N Murthy said that the company would launch iGateway ParentalCQ, iGateway Traffic Management, iGateway SecureICP, iGateway Inline IPS and iGateway CMS by the end of the year.

iGateway ParentalCQ applications include URL blocking, real-time URL rating, policy management and real-time reporting in a centrally managed solution.

It is slated for launch in the next three months. iGateway Traffic Management provides traffic shaping and traffic policing features on per interface basis. This product is currently under development.

It will support iGateway SecureICP which is an integrated software platform with security, voice, wireless VoIP. iGateway SecureICP will be launched by June.