WatchGuard
More info
- Released
- 1996
- Type
- Security company
The Seattle company behind the bright red firewall box sitting in the supply closet of countless small businesses.
WatchGuard was founded in Seattle in 1996 and made its name with the Firebox, a preconfigured firewall in a red steel case aimed at companies without a network engineer on staff. The pitch was to package what used to take a Unix server and a consultant into an appliance you could rack and forget.
Through the 2000s the Firebox turned into a UTM appliance with antivirus, web filtering and VPN in one chassis. Vector Capital took the company private in 2006, and in 2020 it bought Spain's Panda Security to add endpoint protection. Its customers are still mostly smaller organisations buying through resellers, the same turf Fortinet and Sophos fight over.