Genians is a sort of pure play company. Genians is a Network solution provider, but nearly all of its revenue come from a single product called "NAC (Network Access Control)" solution. Founder and CEO Lee Dong-beom has lengthy experience on network security software. He himself is a software engineer. He founded Genians back in 2005 after having spent nearly two decades as a software engineer. At the time he founded his own network security company, he saw a huge business opportunity. Before 2005, it was all about firewalls and vaccine programs. But in 2005, Cisco introduced a new concept for network security, which was called "NAC (Network Access Control)".
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Network Access Control (NAC) is a computer networking solution that uses a set of protocols to define and implement a policy that describes how to secure access to network nodes by devices when they initially attempt to access the network. (Courtesy Wikipedia)
When Cisco first introduced its NAC solutions in Korea, many Korean clients weren't really satisfied because Cisco's NAC solutions slowed down their network speed substantially. This made Lee see a huge business opportunity. He thought what if he could make another NAC solution that wouldn't put too much burden on network speed. This was how he began his first business venture back in 2005. He basically developed a sort of customized and localized version of Cisco's NAC, which was lighter and less expensive. He began selling his own version of NAC in the second half of 2006, and since then, his company successfully carved out a very nice niche in Korea's network security solution market.
In 2012, Lee and his company saw another huge business opportunity. Around 2012, Korea saw an explosive use of Portable Wireless Devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs and various IoT devices. All of these portable wireless devices came to enterprise networks. That is, networks needed a whole different approach to address many new security threats posed by these portable wireless devices. As a result, the company developed something called "Genian NAC Suite", which basically combined its NAC equipment with WIPS (wireless intrusion prevention system). So, this is basically a wireless NAC.
A wireless intrusion prevention system (WIPS) is a network device that monitors the radio spectrum for the presence of unauthorized access points (intrusion detection), and can automatically take countermeasures (intrusion prevention). (Courtesy Wikipedia)
Starting 2014, this so-called "wireless NAC" quickly became a huge hit particularly among Korea's local retail banks. This is why the company's sales started soaring starting 2014 (at an annual sales growth rate of 30+%). With this great success with wireless NAC, the company decided to enter the US market. Its US subsidiary was founded in 2016. March this year, it changed its name to "Genians" from "Genie Networks".
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