Shiva cranks up LANRover

Resurrects brand to introduce new products for VPN market

Shiva has resurrected its LANRover brand to rebuild its stature in the virtual private networking (VPN) market.

Shiva was formerly part of Intel until Simple Access, a start-up company making Secure Socket Layer acceleration cards, bought part of the firm and renamed itself Shiva.

The firm has launched two new products: a 1,000 tunnel VPN device; and a combined ADSL router, firewall and 10 tunnel VPN appliance aimed at SMEs.

The products, both under the LANRover brand, will be available in mid-May and the end of June respectively.

Shiva has also appointed a string of distributors across Europe to ship the new products.

Ray Binnion, vice-president sales EMEA at Shiva, said: "We wanted a particular channel model for Europe. High levels of support and availability are vital, so we had to be sure the distributors knew what they were talking about."

Chan Bansal, product marketing manager at Tekdata, said he hoped to have stock of the 1,000 tunnel VPN device by mid-May.

Shiva's line of remote-access server (RAS) devices, discontinued in 2001, is finally being laid to rest by Perle Systems, the firm that offered to continue support for them at the time.

Perle is now referring customers to its own RAS offerings. Kevin Segriff, networking product manager at Perle, said: "Lots of our RAS business in the last six months has consisted of replacing old Shiva devices with Perle 833 servers."

He acknowledged that Shiva's brand still had currency. "The technology was one thing, but there's still great brand recognition to this day," he said.