Nokia Selling Its Firewall Appliance Business

Back in the day, and that day was a Tuesday, at the beginning of the DotCom boom, I used to install lots of firewalls as a contractor for a vendor. It was that experience that grounded me in information security and served as a foundation for my current career. Most of those appliances installed were Nokia Firewalls. They were big and heavy and after installing two dozen or so of them, it actually got pretty easy to do. Some of my customers included Nike, Bluefly, and Martha Stewart before she went to the poke. I traveled coast to coast and even spent some time in America’s armpit, Arkadelphia Arkansas.

So its with a little sadness to note that Nokia is ditching their firewall appliance business to concentrate on their cellphones.

Steinnon says at his blog here:

Nokia, the cell phone giant, is finally selling its security appliance business.  It terms of revenue there was a time when this business was the number three firewall company in the world after Check Point and Cisco.

Nokia bundled products from Check Point and ISS on hardware platforms that they had originally acquired from Ipsilon Networks in 1997 to create a purpose built appliance running a derivative of BSD.  Through superior customer support and taking advantage of Check Point’s lack of an appliance strategy, Nokia’s security division thrived.

I can’t wait to see who gets the appliances.