Rohati, which joined the Jericho Forum, the group dedicated to encouraging alternatives to traditional perimeter firewalls for e-commerce, is targeting TNS for organizations that allow business partners to share network resources with internal users.

JDS Uniphase, among others, is said to be a beta tester.

Others say they want to give it a test run, too.

At Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Mark Rein, senior director of IT, says the healthcare provider allows clinical-equipment vendors such as GE, Philips and Siemens to remotely maintain software for X-ray machines and other medical equipment. But "today there's no way to keep them from hopping from server to server or X-ray to X-ray" once they've gained access via a VPN, Rein points out.

Mercy Medical Center will begin testing the Rohati appliance this summer in the hope of tackling its complicated access-control situation.

TNS 100 starts at $20,000 and TNS 500 starts at $85,000.

More on Rohati's founders

Rohati's five co-founders departed Cisco in the spring of 2006 to launch their start-up. Here's more on them:

* Abhijit Patra, vice president of software engineering: Spent more than nine years at Cisco, where he was responsible for the architecture and delivery of products across multiple platforms, including ATM, L3 switch and L4-L7 service modules. He also led the development of two purpose-built security service modules for Catalyst 6500-SSL Acceleration and SSL VPN, from concept to completion. Prior to this, he was a key architect/designer for the 8500 Switch.

* Prashant Gandhi, vice president of product marketing and strategy: Spent eight years at Cisco, where he held product marketing and strategy positions, primarily in the Cat 6000 and Data Center business units. While at Cisco, he led the definition of multiple strategic products including IPTV and IP Gaming; Metro Ethernet; the next-generation Catalyst 6500 forwarding engine; Ethernet DSLAM; deep packet forwarding engine; trusted security; self-managed networking; network virtualization, and XML Web services, as well as Cisco's next-generation data center switch. Additionally, he was the early marketing liaison for the company's Data Center Ethernet initiative.

* Anant Thakar, vice president of hardware engineering: Spent nine years at Cisco, where he held the role of lead system architect. Thakar architected and designed several of Cisco's supervisor boards, high-density 10G Ethernet line cards, as well as derivative products for the Metro Ethernet market. Earlier in his career, he started Helios Microsystems.

* Kirti Prabhu, vice president of software engineering:  At Cisco he led development teams in San Jose and India that architected and delivered the company's Firewall Services Module, a service blade for the Catalyst 6500 switch, as well as application inspection for all networking and VoIP protocols and the application firewall. He also developed and led platform software and redundancy initiatives for the first two generations of the Catalyst 6500 supervisor modules. Before Cisco, Prabhu worked for Zexel USA.