Astaro has been showing up on my radar screen a lot lately. They're working on several different areas of interest for me. This release about a new R&D center in Poland caught my eye for a couple different reasons.

First, I'm seeing a rise in R&D and labs being openly used by companies as a tool to display their capabilities. I think we went through a period where focused R&D and finely directed lab research just wasn't as important to some companies. I think that's changing across the whole landscape (but not for all companies).

The other thing that caught my eye was the R&D going into Poland. While we don't always think of Poland as a high-tech center, it really is an area of the world where technology plays a very strong role. I think I crossed paths with Vassilovski some time back working on a project between Lucent-Alcatel and Verizon, but can't truly remember. But some quick research leads me to believe we're going to see some strong initiatives from this new Astaro R&D facility.

Astaro To Focus on Centralized Security Management at New R&D Center in Poland

Burlington, MA - January 18, 2008 – Astaro Corporation (www.astaro.com), a leader in delivering unified threat management (UTM) security appliances, today announced it has opened a new Research & Development center in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The new R&D center is designed to escalate Astaro’s technology into new frontiers of network security approaches and modes of delivery, including next-generation malware detection and blocking, email discovery and messaging, security management and other anti-threat applications. Astaro is also preparing for the release of a new product line in 2008.

The main objective for the R&D center is to drive the development of Astaro’s centralized management product, Astaro Command Center (ACC). Currently staffed by five engineers, plans are already underway to hire additional developers over the next few months to grow the team.

Operations will be managed by Pavel Vassilovski, a former computer scientist with 12 years of experience working for Alcatel-Lucent, where he focused on projects that centered on telecommunications domains such as switching, messaging and network management. While at Alcatel-Lucent, Vassilovski was responsible for the development and deployment of real-time traffic management systems and OSS/BSS services to large telco providers including Vodafone and Verizon.

“We are pleased to be opening a large R&D center in the heart of Poland, where a lot of undiscovered and willing IT talent resides,” said Jan Hichert, Astaro co-founder and CEO. “The new development center will give Astaro the ability to take our product plans from conception to the market place with increased speed and a higher level of quality. We are anxiously awaiting the latest release of ACC which will increase the functionality and visibility of centralized management and network protection.”

About Astaro
Astaro Corporation is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. and Karlsruhe, Germany. The Astaro Security Gateway, simplifying Email, Web & Network Security, has won numerous industry awards and is protecting over 30,000 networks in 60 countries. Astaro products are distributed by a worldwide network of nearly 2,500 solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit www.astaro.com .