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Firmware solution integrates broadband VPN and device management

Taipei and Toronto, May 6, 2003 — Arcturus Networks Inc. and BenQ Corporation today announced collaboration on a SoHo product aimed at the Carrier and Service Provider markets. The joint project, based on a BenQ hardware design requires Arcturus to deliver management, firewall and VPN firmware on a high-speed MIPS based platform.

The pressure for OEMs and ODMs to quickly deliver product to market is tremendous. Existing RG solution providers supply application stacks or driver layers that ride on top or underneath another vendor’s OS. This approach frequently leaves an OEM or ODM with the task of integrating software from multiple vendors to create a final product. Arcturus takes a different approach by providing highly integrated and complete product solutions. This approach reduces development risk for an OEM or ODM and gets their product to market faster. Arcturus offers the ability to optimize solutions at each step of the development cycle, including hardware, tools, OS, drivers, and all ISO layers including applications. This approach results in highly integrated firmware products from a single vendor source.

BenQ selected Arcturus as technology provider because Arcturus clearly demonstrated scalable, highly portable solutions and a proficiency at optimizing these solutions on various targets at multiple layers.

“Our software products, sentryVPN and MIBflex, have been designed to offer an unparalleled level of portability and extensibility,” said Bruce Maxwell, Arcturus CEO. “Coupled with our integration skill this allowed us to offer BenQ a complete RG product that met their requirement for an aggressive schedule.”

The BenQ product is a powerful networking solution targeted at providing high-speed VPN and firewall protection to broadband enabled business and homes. Based on a sophisticated MIPS core microcontroller it represents an evolution in performance from the existing solutions in the marketplace today.

“The real advantage for BenQ, was the ability of Arcturus to provide a complete and very integrated firmware solution, providing everything we needed to enable our product from device initialization to firmware applications,” said Honda Sheng, Associate Vice-President Broadband Business, BENQ Corporation.