Profile: Keith Glennan, CEO, Network Box

The industry veteran and start-up man places his bets on a box with legs. CRN chats with Glennan about his offering to the security channel.

By its very nature, IT is disruptive, but every now and again a new way of doing things comes along that turns everything on its head.

With the introduction of managed security appliance Network Box, co-founder and CEO Keith Glennan may have, in the words of a competitor, "screwed the market for everyone else".

However, the Network Box solution offers hard-pressed resellers and systems integrators a way to meet the security needs of their customers without having to build expensive security competence and infrastructure.

Today, Glennan and his company sell the hardware, software and security service under a service fee arrangement. It incorporates antivirus, anti-spam, VPN, web content filtering, firewall, intrusion detection and system reporting -- in one unit.

Glennan could be classed as an IT veteran. He kicked off his IT career with the completion of a Bachelor of Applied Science, majoring in Computing, at the Chisholm Institute and RMIT.

Starting at Hewlett-Packard in 1984 doing software development, he stayed there for several years before moving to IBM. After two years with Big Blue, Glennan freelanced for a couple of years before teaming up with Andrew Tune to form the Technix Consulting Group.

The pair ran Technix for about eight years, transforming it from a programming outfit doing specialised networking, Unix kernel research and device drivers, into a consultancy offering a range of security and systems integration consulting, before selling it to ASX-listed company eSec in early 2000.

Glennan stayed on as Asia Pacific general manager of consulting for two years before taking a six-
month sabbatical. It was while he was holidaying in Hong Kong that Glennan met an IT consultant, Michael Gazeley, who, with his partner, had essentially been doing in Hong Kong what Technix had been doing in Australia. After they had been talking for a while, Glennan decided he wanted to have a closer look at Gazeley’s current project.

"In the end I bought a Network Box on the spot -- the company had been going for about 12 months at that stage -- brought it home, pulled it apart, did penetration testing on it, all sorts of things," says Glennan.

He and Tune decided the Network Box had legs and a new company was conceived in October 2002.

Between Technix and a New York-based company he had been involved with in the late 1990s, Glennan was no stranger to start-ups, but he was somewhat surprised by the mixed reactions he received from the channel when he started to talk to potential resellers about Network Box.

"There are organisations out there who we are now having discussions with and they are now quite keen, but two years ago they wouldn’t have spat on us if we were on fire," says Glennan. "We were a little bit surprised to say the least."

"We didn’t go out to make a big splash but we started to put the feelers out there, speaking to a number of resellers, and said, 'This is what we’ve got, how does that fit in with what you’re doing?' We got mixed responses."