Hyderabad: The $10 million Silicon Valley-based Intoto Inc, provider of integrated security, wireless and voice software platforms has plans to invest $15 million in India over a period of five years to scale up its operations in India. The additional investment will be used to set up development centres in Chennai and Bangalore. The company already has a development centre in Hyderabad.

Intoto provides integrated, secure and embedded gateway infrastructure software products to security, wireless and voice software for networking and communications equipment manufacturers, mainly in the US and Taiwan.

Sathyan Iyengar, founder, chief executive officer and president of Intoto, revealed that a US-based venture capital agency, AsiaTech Management and a corporate partner have together pumped in $11 million into Intoto, to enable the company expand its operations in India.

Intoto has so far licensed its iGateway software solutions to over 100 networking and communications equipment vendors. The iGateway platform includes security, convergence, connectivity and management solutions for security appliances and broadband networking equipment such as DSL, cable and wireless gateways, firewall and VPN appliances, integrated access devices, SOHO and residential gateways, access routers and multi-service switch gateway equipment.

According to Iyengar, "Intoto India is integral to the company's operations and is planned to be the hub of products development. The company will continue to expand its operations in India, particularly at its Hyderabad centre," he said. The Indian operations will be responsible for design, development and maintenance of all Intoto's communication products. In addition, it will address future broadband and enterprise communication equipment requirements, he added.

He said, "The additional investment of $15million will be spent over a period of five years in India in new hardware, testing labs, products development and manpower." In the immediate future the company plans to invest about $ 3 million at its Hyderabad facility to increase manpower to 160 as against 120 professionals now.

The company also plans to set up new centres in Chennai, Bangalore and Pune. It has also taken an international private leased line connectivity (IPLC) which would become operational next month.

The company has so far invested about $6 million into its Hyderabad operations out of the $14 million it raised from angel investors during the last three years.

According to SN Murthy, president and chief operating officer, Intoto Software India Pvt Ltd, said, "Since it began operations in 1998, Intoto India has been focusing on building niche products in the area of security, voice and wireless technologies for the OEMs in the communication sector."

Murthy said the company would launch iGateway ParentalCQ, iGateway Traffic Management, iGateway SecureICP, iGateway Inline IPS and iGateway CMS by the end of the year. iGateway ParentalCQ applications include URL blocking, real-time URL rating, policy management and real-time reporting in a centrally managed solution.

This is slated for launch in the next three months. iGateway Traffic Management provides traffic shaping and traffic policing features on per-interface basis. This product is currently under development.
It will support iGateway SecureICP which is an integrated software platform with security, voice, wireless VoIP. iGateway SecureICP will be launched by June.

The company recently moved to its new 22,000 sq ft facility in Hyderabad from where it will scale up its technical research and development teams. The company says the integrated security market has been estimated at $2.7 billion and is scheduled to touch $5 billion by 2007 with a compounded annual growth rate of 40 per cent.

The company has been generating revenues since it began operations in the US five years ago and has over 750,000 installations across the US, Europe, Asia Pacific, he said.