Press

LayerN changes name to Britestream
By Loring Wirbel

Comms Design – EE Times Community

October 25, 2004

Colorado Springs, Colo. — Layer N Networks Inc., an Austin-based security-processor company specializing in Secure Sockets Layer silicon, said Monday (Oct. 25) that it has changed its name to Britestream Networks Inc.

Though Britestream says it has made no fundamental changes in strategy, the launch of a network interface card, the BN1010, indicates a shift to the broadly-held belief that chip-level security functions above the IPsec layer make a tough standalone business compared to board-level solutions. Several of Britestream's competitors, including Corrent Corp. and CyberGuard Inc., have shifted to board-level security-processors. Cavium Networks Inc., meanwhile, recently combined control-plane processing using a MIPS core with its security-specific hardware blocks.

According to two former employees, Layer N had experienced difficulty in pulling together new funding in the early summer, until the board brought in Bob Weinschenk, former president of digital-imaging company Pixim Inc., as Layer N's new chief executive. Weinschenk, who spent several years as director of chip-set businesses at AMD Inc., did not displace any founders, and former chief executive Mike Salas now serves as vice president of marketing.

Weinschenk said in an interview that there was plenty of funding when he joined the company in July, but the real issue was showing that Layer N could effectively bring a product into production. Because that product emphasized streaming security, he said, its volume availability represented the best time to opt for a corporate name change.

" I came in to the company to build up product delivery," Weinschenk said. "We needed to clearly say what we could do, and then do what we say." Because the company's Instream Security Processing architecture always has combined TCP/IP termination and SSL processing, the most viable form factor for delivering such functions has been a standard PCI card with drivers for common environments like Windows XP and Linux. Weinschenk said he recognizes that other board-level form factors may be necessary as SSL processing takes place at various points within a network, but "this is overwhelmingly a PCI world out there, and we can listen to customers when looking at future architectures like PCI Express."

Does this imply that Britestream will halt Layer N's original plans for a chip-level business? Weinschenk said that two months ago, he might have elected to exit standalone semiconductors, but the requests he got from some customers as the BN1010 board went into production indicated that Britestream can continue a healthy chip business as a secondary effort to its network interface cards. Britestream plans to pursue a mix of channels, including OEMs, system integrators, and resellers for its products. Weinschenk said that the name change was initiated early enough in the sales cycle so that customer re-education will not be a major issue.


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