The North American network security solutions market is a pretty crowded place these days. But that’s not scaring off NSFOCUS, which is currently expanding beyond its origins in China.

“We are being led into the North American market by our customers,” explained Vann Abernathy, product manager at NSFOCUS, during a TMCnet video interview at Interop (News - Alert) 2011.

Those customers, Abernathy said, include the world’s largest bank, the world’s largest telecom, and the world’s largest web portal – enterprises that now have operations in North America, South America, and Europe and want to continue using NSFOCUS security solutions in those markets.

Abernathy acknowledged that entering this competitive market in North America will be a challenge, but expressed confidence that it will be successful by employing a strategy based on building trust over time.

“Instead of selling direct, we are going to people who have already earned trust in the market,” he said. “We could go out and buy recognition. But, we have to earn reputation.”

NSFOCUS expects that being trusted by some very big customers will help its protection systems get the attention of value-added resellers and other solution providers. The company has already completed testing to prove the veracity of its products, and is now also in the process of working with partners to verify code.

“Our product stands up very well to others in the market,” Abernathy said. “We are as good, if not better, than our competitors. But we have to go out there and prove that.”

NSFOCUS’s product line originated with its Anti-DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack solution, better known by its acronym ADS. This solution has morphed into a complete intrusion prevention system, differentiated primarily by a sophisticated set of application behavior analysis engines.

“In Asia, we have a research staff of hundreds who are dedicated to finding new threats, and finding ways to eliminate or divert them,” Abernathy explained during the video interview. “That allows us to see threats that don’t have a signature yet, in real-time.”

After being red-flagged, potential threats are sent to the research team where they are verified and assigned a signature. That signature is provided to customers, and also to the global security community.

Watch the full video interview for more discussion about network security, including the necessity of multi-layer security, trends in staying ahead of attackers, the value of bi-directional threat monitoring, and what’s ahead for cloud computing security.

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