WatchGuard Technologies Co Ltd, a leading network security solutions provider and one of the world's top five companies specializing in high-technology firewalls, opened its fifth global research and development center in Chengdu this month.

WatchGuard CEO Joe Wang said the R&D center was opened in Chengdu to capitalize on the city's high-skills work force.

"It took only three months for us to get things done. From planning to recruiting people, we were able to team up dozens of excellent engineers in a quite short time," Wang said. "It was utterly beyond our expectations."

Product testing

Wang said the center at the city's Tianfu Software Park in the Chengdu High-Tech Zone will primarily focus on testing to improve product safety, reliability and accessibility for commercial business users around the world.

"In China we set up two R&D centers in Beijing and Chengdu. There are also other R&D centers in our headquarters in Seattle and in Toronto (and other locations). In China, the Beijing-based center is engaged in research and development while Chengdu center is engaged in worldwide products testing. New products developed in the United States will be available in Chengdu by isochronous transfer for automated tests," Wang said.

Software skills

WatchGuard studied and compared the competitiveness of work forces in several cities before deciding on Chengdu, Wang said, adding that the "talent pool Chengdu already owns" contributed to being able to open the center so quickly.

WatchGuard also signed strategic agreements with Southwest Jiaotong University and Chengdu University of Electronic Science and Technology to attract more skilled workers.

Wang said computer network security issues must embrace innovation in the light of the ever-changing cloud computing area, as well as the mobile Internet terminal industry. WatchGuard firewalls designed for network security based on cloud computing thus far has yielded some results, he said, citing the promise of the company's Internet Reputation Assessment System.

"Through the global detection system, cloud computing allows us to pre-capture a virus existing on the websites of different terminals and to render an immediate alert, so as to enable the core operations remain in a safe state," Wang said.