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NCipher's new card faces competition
Tuesday, October 16 2001
by Stan Van Haasteren


NCipher has released a PCI card called nFast 800, but the product comes four
months after Irish firm AEP launched its device with more than twice nFast's
speed. 

Nfast 800, which follows the firm's earlier product nFast 300 and nFast 150, can
be inserted in almost any server and allows it to process 800 transactions per
second. The company claims that compared to servers that have no PCI card at all,
an nFast 800 enabled server is five times as fast. "You can do transactions
within a fraction of a second," Ed Wood, product manager at nCipher UK, said. 



Wood expects that now that it is possible to have fast and secure connections,
Web designers will decide more often to make connections secure. Most
transactions that transfer credit card numbers already use secure connections and
with the new technology the company expects that the transfer of passwords or
e-mail addresses over the Web will also be protected.





The nFast 800 has a manufacturer's suggested retail price of USD3,495 and will be
available from 01 November.

 

NFast 800 and AEP2000 both uses secure socket layers (SSL's) that scramble and
unscramble sensitive information. This makes it extremely difficult for attacker
to intercept the information, if the server takes the necessary precautions.
However, servers have to do a lot of complicated and time-consuming mathematics
to scramble and unscramble the information. The PCI cards are designed to speed
up this process. 



nCipher faces some competition in the market from companies like Rainbow in the
US, but also from an Irish start-up that claims to have developed a similar PCI
card in June that allows 2000 transactions per second. 



Bray-based AEP limited launched its AEP2000 in June and subsequently has had the
speed of its PCI card verified by Network Computing in a report released in
September. 



Chris Meehan, AEP's chief financial officer said, "It would be our contention
that we have the fastest SSL accelerator on the market." Meehan said that
although the company had less visibility than its publicly traded competitors,
its product was gaining exposure and the company was seeing a growing interest in
its technology. The AEP2000, available now, sells for around USD3,750





Currently AEP employs 62 people in its offices in Bray, London and California. It
was founded 1999 and to date the company has received IEP9.5 million in
investment and is currently seeking an additional IEP15 million. Regarding the
funding, Meehan said the company is currently in discussion with a number of
potential investors.





The number of Web sites using SSL has increases with 50 percent over the last 12
months, claimed Mike Prettejohn, director of independent research company
Netcraft. "For high volume e-retail, home banking and on-line brokerage Web
sites the business case for SSL acceleration has always been clear." 



AEP is at http://www.AEP-crypto.comand
nCipher is at  http://www.ncipher.com.