Cisco Systems Inc. Wednesday vowed to make its corporate virtual private network products work seamlessly with its service-provider VPN products and backed up the claim with two products aligned with the strategy. VPNs let customers carry business traffic safely on the Internet by setting up secure, encrypted "tunnels" on the Internet between business sites.

One of the two new products, VPN 3002 Hardware Client, is especially helpful to Elliot Zeltzer, manager of telecommunications network services at Gedas Inc., a subsidiary of Volkswagen USA that "insources" the car company's data and IT systems. The $995 device simplifies the administration of a VPN by eliminating the need for VPN clients at remote sites to administer a customer's VPN policies. The 3002 "is much lower than traditional [solutions] at maybe a third of the price and is a lot simpler to administer," says Zeltzer. Gedas was a beta site for testing the 3002 and plans to implement the devices in its network, he says.

Also new for corporate buyers is Cisco's VPN 5001 Concentrator, which previously had been sold almost exclusively to Cisco's service-provider customers. In a corporate network, the device can be used as a VPN access concentrator for networks that run multiple hardware platforms and operating systems, Cisco executives say.

Both products fall under Cisco's "Unity" strategy, which calls for Cisco in the next 18 months to create interoperability between all of its corporate and service-provider VPN products. The two new products are available now. The VPN 3002 costs $995 for a dual Ethernet version and $1,195 for an eight-port fast Ethernet version. The VPN 5001 costs $19,000.