Incorporating a 3rd-party utility or service is a considerable risk. The “buy or build” discussion is a common one in any software development shop. Leveraging your vision and intellectual property by integrating it with already existing, proven 3rd-party technology can significantly reduce time to market, improve level of technology to market, and increase scalability. It can also allow your product to scale easier. Working with a development toolkit that is well defined and does what it says can be a real pleasure.

Many integration companies want to include Internet filtering in their product suite. They are looking for a service that is accurate, relevant, and easy to integrate. The function calls must be lightweight with little overhead. Development-support response time and understanding is critical.

The entire Netsweeper product line interacts with our Categorization Service: the infrastructure and architecture that handles all of our customer traffic. Through our PDK, we can provide you with the ability to tie in to this service.

Internet filtering SDK's are available from several vendors. Most are feeds of a list, updated periodically. Are you seeking a real-time solution? Something that will respond to your categorization requests as you make them? Do you want the best?

Some integrators choose to get along with a “list” of URLs and their categorization. The list tends to be uncomfortably large and of course, it is out of date the moment it is downloaded. For those who felt that their solution required a more interactive Internet filter solution, the list-based solutions weren't good enough.

Netsweeper's competitive advantage revolves around our intellectual property – how we categorize web sites in near real time. It is what attracts customers to our filtering products. It also attracts those looking to integrate Internet filtering in their own product offering. We\'ve even had other Internet filtering companies incorporate our backend system to drive their front end.