Based in California and founded by Sameer Parekh, C2Net began marketing privacy protection services for ISP subscribers in 1994. Expanding on this vision, the company went on to recruit highly skilled encryption and security programmers to produce an entire line of Internet data security products. Developing the software outside the US, these products were available world-wide.

Copy of C2Net Web page from August 2000

To ensure C2Net's position as a global leader in providing full strength cryptography products, C2Net Europe Ltd was founded in November 1997 to head up world-wide product development and promote C2Net's product line outside the USA. To do this C2Net bought some technology and employees from UK Web, a small company based in England. Mark J. Cox was Managing Director of C2Net Europe Ltd. Paul Sutton was Technical Director.

C2Net's flagship product was the Stronghold Secure Web Server, an SSL server for Unix with full-strength, 128-bit encryption. SafePassage Secure Tunnel was developed to secure TCP/IP transmissions and before changes in US export laws made 128-bit browsers globally available, C2Net gained a reputation for its SafePassage Web Proxy. Major banks and international corporations used this client-side software to add full strength encryption to 40-bit export crippled browsers.

C2Net believed in making the best even better. Taking the world's favourite Web server, Apache, C2Net developers added features and functionality to make Stronghold Web Server the unbeatable option for commercial applications. A commitment to providing the best technical support available together with customer focused product development put C2Net at the cutting edge of e-business security software providers.

The people behind C2Net were heavily involved in Apache, and part of company philosophy was to support open-source projects. Since 1995, C2Net employed core Apache, OpenSSL, SSLeay and mod_ssl developers some of whom had contributed to Apache since version 0.5. In addition to providing development resources, C2Net organised the first ever Apache developers' conference, ApacheCon '98, and published a weekly online journal for Apache users. Now in its sixth year, Apache Week has over 11,000 subscribers to the e-mail version and is still going strong. Proud to be involved with the Apache project since the beginning, part of C2Net's long-term commitment to openly available software was an ongoing contribution of time and developer resources.

C2Net's first secure web server was launched on December 20 1995. This initial version, released exclusively for the US market, was known as "Apache-SSL-Commerce". In 1996, the first product released for global markets was an all-new commercial version of Apache with added security. From then on, the server was branded as Stronghold Web Server. Stronghold Web Server soon became the leading SSL Web Server for Unix platforms. Within 2 months of international release, the Netcraft server survey showed an increase of 500% in Stronghold Web Server installations and for a number of years was consistently been rated the number one choice. Stronghold Web Server can claim many firsts including support for hardware acceleration, support for client certificates (Digital IDs), HTTP/1.1 support, TLS v1.0 support, and was also the first Apache-based server to support Verisign's Global Server IDs.

By 2000, C2Net had built a world-class management team comprising:

• Bill Rowzee. President & CEO. With over 15 years experience as CEO and CFO of a major technology company.
• Sameer Parekh. Named one of the "50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet" by Newsweek magazine
• Douglas Barnes. Extensive experience of the computer industry including patent enforcement
• John Gilmore. Co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, the EFF, Cypherpunks.
• Mark J Cox. Core team member of open source projects, Managing Director of C2Net Europe.

C2Net was aquired by Red Hat Inc. in September 2000.

Created: 11 Sep 2000