The Royal Treatment

 I spoke with SmoothWall’s Vice President of Sales Richard Moore. SmoothWall is a U. K. Internet security firm that has recently entered the U. S. education market, and is setting up shop in Charlotte, North Carolina.

DA: “Richard, SmoothWall is successful in the U. K., so what’s your goal in the U. S. Education market?”

Richard Moore: “As you know, we’re a U. K. company and have been doing business since 2001. But the biggest growth has been in Web content filtering in U. S. school districts. And that’s made us realize that in the U. K. we have the usual support people - developers and sales teams, so we’re going to bring support and sales people to the U. S. to do things like meet customers and do demos.”

DA: “So, you want to do some of the same things in the U. S. that you’re doing in the U. K.?”

Moore: “One of the things we found early on - doing the education shows like NECC was that we’re not as well known as some of our competitors. When people look at our product they see that we can do what we say we can do, but the question has been, how can you support it from the U. K.? In effect we already have through 1-800 numbers, virtual coverage, but we realize that people like to talk local - it will make our name more familiar here. We’re now in 50 districts and the Northeast Regional Information Center. A big issue that everyone talks about is anonymous proxies and when we’re asked whether we can block them, of course our answer is yes we can block and control that.”

DA: “Richard, you certainly have a can do attitude. That should play well here.”

Moore: “We actually hear that a lot and we believe our product is mature enough now to stand up to others in the field. It looks good, works better in some circumstances - we have artificial intelligences built right into it. We’re privately owned small British company, so every deal is important to us, so our attitude is that we do what it takes to make it work.”

DA: “Can you talk about the artificial intelligence piece?”

Moore: “It all goes back to when Web content filtering was keyword based, so if the filtering involved the keyword sex, everything was filtered out - Middlesex Cricket Club - everything was filtered. And then the industry pushed over to URL filtering, which is still the predominant way of doing things — the bigger the database the better. It’s the way that many of our competitors tend to do filtering. We’re finding through our work in the U. K. that we have the best of all worlds - we have our own proprietary URL lists we’ve also got word and slave lists, which are updated daily, and we’ve got the Guardian engine in there, which basically scans every Web page in real time, and attempts to categorize it if it’s not seen it before. It doesn’t matter how many URLs you claim to have on your blocked list, because there are half a million Web sites being added daily. Everything counts that we categorize in the artificial intelligence (AI) engine, which allows us to do things like classifying within sites. For example you could have a school child access the news on CNN.com, but at the same time you could say that if the level of hatred or violence of a particular story was above a certain threshold, then you could deny them access to that page or that story. That’s very difficult to do with just a URL filter. The crowning glory is that we can inspect content that just comes from an IP address, which takes in those who attempt to set up the anonymous proxy software through DSL connections. And that has been a big story for us, because we not just looking for the URLs, we capture well over 99 percent of them.

We also have a product called School Guardian, which incorporates a firewall into the solution. Guardian filters are accredited by the British Educational Communications Technology Agency (Becta) and meet the requirements of the
U. S. Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
We are on a schedule to launch new products every two years and updates every six months. If you have the license, you always get the new features.”

DA: “So Richard, if you have the license, you don’t have to pay extra for the upgrades?”

Moore: “There’s no need to reinstall or send the appliance back, it’s all fully automatic. If you want those features, you just let us know and you get them.
We launched our new, 2008 products in Austin’s TCEA and testing is going on right now. Feature Pack One for the 2008 products will ready the beginning July, and it has a lot of new features - the filtering, the firewall and part of the new line-up, which includes instant messaging filtering. We see that as really completing what we have and key to the needs of schools. Most school children tend to use IM more than any other kind of communication, and it’s typically the hardest thing to police. The cyber-bullies and cyber-stalkers can have an IM account with pretty much no identity required.”

DA: “What would a district need to do in order to get started with SmoothWall?”

Moore: “Visiting the site for our contact information, or a trial download, and soon we’ll be adding our Charlotte location. Because we take the software appliance approach you can download the software in five minutes - so download it and actually try it for 30 days. If you like it, we’ll give you the pricing - if you don’t like it, we’ll go away and won’t bother you.”

DA: “You mean - you can download it and try it…

Moore: “The thing about SmoothWall is that we’re one of a very few vendors now that take the software-appliance route. We send out a software image and you take your own choice of server class hardware and install it onto your hardware. It has its own operating system, which we fully maintain and control. So, it turns your own choice of hardware into a dedicated security appliance. It’s exactly like any other box you buy. You administer the thing by way of a Web GUI across the network. It’s got all the same features; the only difference is you’ve made your own choice of hardware. So if you’re an HP or a Dell house all you need is our download and we don’t need to sell you another device.”

DA: “That should be a big seller, too. You don’t have to change your hardware.”

Moore: “Right - most districts will have some sort of hardware kicking around. An average high school can get the whole nine yards of our software onto a 2.5 GHz box, with a couple Gigs of RAM, which really can take a lot of the cost out.”

DA: “That should get the attention of district tech directors, with boxes, looking for a security solution.”