February 18, 2005
Eli Security Device Set To Take SOHO World By Storm
Multi-talented firewall and router is designed right, priced right for the SOHO market.
The RSA Conference saw the debut of Eli, which will soon arrive in the small-office-home-office (SOHO) world. If the entrepreneurs behind it can get their marketing plans to work, it might just take the office-at-home and consumer worlds by storm.
What's an Eli? It's a DSL modem, it's an Ethernet router, it's an 802.11G wireless router, it's a 4-port switch, it's a web firewall, it's a virus firewall, and it's a spam firewall. (It can interface to an external modem for cable users.) It can optionally create and protect voice-over-IP (VoIP) and virtual private network (VPN) environments suitable for home-based and very small businesses and for corporate employees working at home.
The invention of an American-born German, Eli is going to be available in March from Electronic Lifestyle Integration, which plans to market the product directly, to enterprise IT professionals who manage workers at home, and to ISPs who will re-sell it to consumer and SOHO business users.
The price is planned to be set at $200, with a $10.00 per month service charge for the basic firewall, spam and virus services. The optional VoIP and VPN services have not yet been priced.
The technology behind Eli is so simple you have to wonder why the big guns haven't figured this one out before. All of the filtering technology is hosted on a remote server. The basics are laid out by a main home server, and a network of regional servers hosts individual Eli machines. When an ISP or enterprise host is involved, they will provide the regional server.
The technical strategy keeps the hardware costs of Eli to a minimum. In particular, no expensive magnetic memory is involved in the machine because all of the required storage is located elsewhere.
Spam messages are marked as such, and users can receive them and re-route them into special folders using e-mail client instructions, or just have Eli delete them. There are some other options as well, and all of Eli's security facilities can be user controlled, including a vast array of Web content filtering options.
Assuming the company can pull it off, Eli will be a killer product, and because Messaging Pipeline has more than once called on the industry to make such a product, you can bet Eli will be reviewed here very early in its commercial life. That's expected to be in March, so keep your eyes on this site.
For more information, visit .
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