What We Do
We develop the systems and manage the services used by businesses for their IT strategy. These systems and services include a wide range of innovative components that give our customers a clear edge over their competitors.
Company History
The company was born on August 12, 1998 , founded by Craig Benting as a part-time endeavor in his garage at his home in the Silicon Valley. The main focus was research and development of Internet and network technologies to solve problems observed in his work directing an IT organization in a medium sized business.
From 1998 until 2004, the primary focus was on the search for and development of lower cost, more powerful, more admin-friendly, open source alternatives to expensive vertical market network analysis tools used by IT professionals. The secondary focus was on the development of lower cost, faster, more business-friendly, open source alternatives to Microsoft Windows domain controllers and file servers.
In late 2004, the first NetNinja™ was developed and put into a production environment as an automated, adaptive network analysis and defense system. Viewed by hands-on IT professionals as a powerful alternative to the extremely expensive systems dominating the market at the time, it propelled the company down the path to becoming a full-time operation.
From 2004 until 2007, development of the NetNinja™ continued with Sarbanes-Oxley and legal testing in a production environment. The NetHub™ came into being as a result of the secondary focus in alternative Windows domain-controller and file server development. It was further developed with engineering, manufacturing, and general business user testing in a multi-location, global production environment.
On January 1st, 2008, NetFu Systems officially became a full-time operation with Craig Benting taking the role of CTO.
Throughout 2008, the final feature roadmaps for the NetNinja™ and NetHub™ were laid out and completed with final development and testing on a variety of hardware platforms. Testing involved installation at customer sites with the feedback driving the final product designs.
In late 2008, the Asia office was established in the Philippines to support customer IT projects and server administration services.
On January 1st, 2009, we acquired the IT products and services company VNVNC (VN Virtual Network Computing) , adding their IT support, managed services, and virtual server hosting to our portfolio.
In April, 2009, the headquarters was moved to a building with larger office, R&D, and server hosting space.
In June, 2009, the NetDog™ was announced and development began with a focus on a lower cost, more business-friendly, open source alternative to Microsoft and other VPN solutions.
In August, 2010, plans began to expand server hosting and general IT infrastructure to datacenters in the midwest.
In January, 2011, the milestone uptime of 99.99% was achieved with customer managed services.
In December, 2011, finalized development of the NetCloud™ system with the cooperation of our customers.
In January, 2012, announced the NetCloud™ system and the near achievement of the holy grail of five nines of uptime (99.999%) in managed services.
In January, 2013, announced expansion to data centers in the Silicon Valley, Colorado, and Wyoming. Also added and managed services including Exchange email, business VoIP, and remote disaster recovery server hosting on-demand.
In January, 2014, announced expansion in space and bandwidth at Silicon Valley data center.
In January, 2015, announced move of the headquarters office to a building in Santa Clara with four times the space of the previous facility, expanding our R&D and staff capacities.
In June, 2016, announced new and improved line of firewalls and routers with additional open source capabilities.
In January, 2017, announced move of the headquarters office to a larger building in Santa Clara with three times the space of the previous office, expanding our R&D and system production facilities.
In March, 2018, announced move of the headquarters to San Jose and creation of a separate logistics and lab center in Santa Clara.
In March, 2019, announced a new line of NetFu Mini PC's that fit in the palm of your hand.
In August, 2019, announced move of headquarters and logistics/lab to a single larger office in San Jose.
The Name
This question comes up a lot since it is a great source of smiles and giggling, so we just tell people that's why it is what it is.
But the serious answer is it has a dual meaning. "Net" obviously stands for networks or networking. Since the founder is a mathematician and programmer at heart, "Fu" was originally intended to be "Foo", which is a programmer's generic term for anything or everything , like a widget. So one meaning is "everything about networking" or "network anything".
Since he has also always had a deep interest in Asian culture, "Fu" was used in the sense of Kung Fu , like "combat", "defense", or "expertise in". So, the other meaning is "network defense" or "networking expertise", an acknowledgement of our roots in the NetNinja™ adaptive network analysis and defense system.