Saudis hook on to YellowTuna's Mako system

Middle Eastern telecommunications giant Saudi Telecom has chosen Auckland networking firm YellowTuna to keep customers free from internet nasties.

The telco will use YellowTuna's Mako Network System management appliance to protect small- and medium-sized customers.

The appliance is a box that acts as a broadband modem, firewall, web content and spam filter, and network management tool.

YellowTuna chief executive Bill Farmer said the deal was expected to be worth more than $7.5 million over the next three years and gave the Albany company a significant reference customer in the Middle East.

The deal came through YellowTuna's British office, but Farmer said the company would now set up a sales and technical support office in Dubai to look for other opportunities in the region.

He said the Mako system communicated with a central server that did all the threat detection, filtering, configuration and other necessary functions. Saudi Telecom had put such servers on its ADSL network.

"The traditional vendors are all looking to be in this space," Farmer said. "Where we have been more successful is we were able to patent the communications system between our client end and our central servers."

Each Mako would serve up to 50 devices on a local area network, he said. It could cope with higher volumes, but that amount of traffic would be too much for a typical broadband connection.

The unit cost about $2500, but it was typically leased with a service package for about $120 a month.

Farmer said YellowTuna was looking for second-round capital to fund its expansion into Europe and the Middle East.

He said getting to its present stage of development, with revenue this year expected to double to about $7.5 million, had involved a lot of learning, a few mistakes and plenty of support from organisations such as New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.

"Coming from New Zealand, there were cultural issues about how to do business, and what we thought was a complete product for the world market was only two-thirds of the way there," he said.

"We started out with a managed firewall. We now have a complete network management system, and it works."