Around 2006, VONOA built small hardware: sensors and appliances in aluminum, TI processors, Ethernet, five volts, made in the United States.
The continuation of that line is unfinished research. It is not a market re-entry.
What that hardware was
The later orchestration suite was called VSOURCE. It held a modular set of controls, including a perimeter guard, intrusion sensors, and virtual appliances. A pod was a managed place for one client’s work. Appliances could be registered and clustered there, and the control purpose of each one could be set. The architecture was a mesh overlay.
The appliance had two Ethernet interfaces. Wireless was optional. On that overlay, an inline appliance could do TAP and tunneling when appliances were clustered. The photograph sets a quarter beside it for scale.
VONOA kept a hosting footprint in Oak Brook, Illinois, in the original Exodus Communications data center. The building’s name and the owners’ names changed many times over the years. Most of the appliances were production monitoring sensors for clients then.
One use was to publish a cloud service inside the client’s own security controls. That suited smaller clients. A preconfigured appliance was mailed, plugged in, and called back over the overlay. Through the TAP and the VPN, Exchange running on a Windows server in that cloud was made available on the premises, inside the client’s controls.
The line was still open on 24 April 2012, when a Built In Chicago note described VSOURCE as a current product. It later closed due to market conditions and timing.
The research now is that technical line, continued. Thin edge hardware, checkable claims, and a packable lift study. It is not a market re-entry.
Back to the beginning, or into the edge.