A former Spanish ISP-turned-security-vendor will officially launch operations in North America on Monday, Dark Reading has learned. Optenet’s founder and president/CEO has relocated from Spain to Miami to head up the expansion.

The privately held Optenet, which has customers such as Telefonica, Orange, O2, Hilton, McDonald’s, and Daimler AG, sells carrier-class content security gateways for service providers and large enterprises that perform Web filtering, antivirus, and anti-spam. Its Content Security Suite is used by service providers looking to offer security services to their customers as well as for their internal security, and by big enterprises that want to centralize and customize end-user security.

Optenet’s products run on an artificial intelligence technique the firm created a decade ago during its days as an ISP. It provides semantic analysis of malware, says Optenet founder Francisco Martin, who is president and CEO of the company. “We use AI to classify content in real-time,” he says.

The gateway products also provide virtualization technology that allows carriers, for instance, to run hundreds of thousands of virtual instances of the gateway software on one hardware platform -- and at line speed.

While the content filtering, URL database, and semantic analysis was all built by Optenet, the company is using Kaspersky Lab’s and Eset's Nod32 antivirus engines.

Service provider customers can log into a Web interface that lets them customize their security settings. “It’s a multi-tenant system for a security application,” Martin says. Enterprises, too, have a centralized console architecture for users’ security settings

But Optenet’s technology itself is really no stranger to the U.S. Alcatel-Lucent, Blue Coat Systems, and Crossbeam Systems, for instance, all use Optenet’s technology in their products under OEM agreements with the firm.

Meanwhile, former Crossbeam vice president of business development Joel Silberman has joined Optenet as vice president of North American operations.

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