NetSTAR

TOKYO November 30, 2004

NetSTAR Inc, the leading company in the Japanese web filtering industry has announced the partnership with Blue CoatR Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI) in deploying NetSTAR’s URL database on Blue Coat’s ProxySG Appliance.

This Alliance has been achieved between Alps System Integration Co. Ltd (ALSI), Blue Coat Systems, and NetSTAR. The Blue Coat Proxy SG appliance with an optional ALSI’s InterSafe URL filtering functionality, will be available on appliances released after December 10, 2004.
Customers who purchase the ProxySG appliance and select the InterSafe’s URL filtering option, will benefit from the ability to filter specific Web threats, while also additionally improving network Web traffic performance.

Where NetSTAR provides its URL database to ALSI’s InterSafe URL filtering software, now lined amongst other integrated databases for the appliance, such as SmartFilter, Websense, SurfControl, ISS bluecoat’s own filtering database, Intersafe will be the first database to be accepted for the Japanese market.
The integration of the URL database will be the first accepted database option to allow large-scale customers throughout Japan, who had chosen the high-performance Proxy SG appliance, but had not the choice of an optimal database for use in Japan.

We believe this partnership was achieved with Blue Coat Systems by the recognition by BlueCoat , that NetSTAR as the top brand holder with a top share of up to 30.5%** in the Japanese URL filtering market, had the required experience and reliability.

NetSTAR will be continuing its efforts in its ongoing creation of the best URL database and filtering engine deployment in a long-term basis. Also in order to provide the URL database to other partner companies, NetSTAR will increasingly be actively working with ALSI and other OEM partners.

**NetSTAR provides its URL database, to the “InterSafe” product family (development/distribution by Alps System Integration Co., Ltd.) and the “InterScan WebManager” product family (development/distribution by Trend Micro Inc.). The total share of these two products will be the share NetSTAR holds in the Japanese web filtering market, and is reported to be 30.5 % (2.2 billion yen) in 2003 and expected to be 33.3%( 3.1 billion yen) in 2004. This data result comes from the Fuji Chimera Research Institute report “2004 Network security business research” issued on July 23, 2004

About NetSTAR

NetSTAR Inc is one of the few companies, which hold the technology for database compilation and classification of URLs, as well as a means of updating and delivering the latest URL database to the customers. NetSTAR’s URL lists are automatically acquired through an advanced algorithm, and our dedicated staff of 30 people, which is the largest scale in Japan, visually confirms each website, and then classifies and registers them.
Since the company establishment in 2001, NetSTAR’s URL database is being updated everyday, and as of November 2004, NetSTAR’s database contains approximately more than 27 million web pages.

Within the database, the most covered language is Japanese, which is approximately 70%, and the other languages are mainly English, Chinese, Spanish and Korean. Nowadays, since the Internet use is not only major through the personal computer, but also through mobile phones, NetSTAR is also working on compilation and classification for mobile phone sites in full scale. The company is headquartered in Tokyo Japan, and has the URL database acquisition center in Sendai (Miyagi Prefecture) Japan.

The products, in which NetSTAR provides its URL database, are the “InterSafe” product family (development/distribution by Alps System Integration Co., Ltd.) and the “InterScan WebManager” product family (development/distribution by Trend Micro Inc.). Both products are provided to enterprises, governments, schools, and home users.

NetSTAR also provides its URL database to Internet access analysis software available by Hammock’s “SurfWatcher”, as well as to systems such as the NIFTY Corporation’s keyword search service, “Shun! Word”, and thus is also expanding outside the filtering product domain.

For more information, visit http://netstar.jp

 

Copyright(c)2004 NetSTAR Inc. All Rights Reserved. NetSTAR is a trademark of NetSTAR Inc. InterSafe is a trademark of Alps System Integration Co.,Ltd, and TRENDMICRO, InterScanWebManager are trademarks of Trend Micro Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners