Enterprise Chameleon is a plug-n-play network appliance that allows all Web surfers in the enteprise to benefit from the anonymous surfing capabilities made possible by the vendor. In a nutshell, Enterprise Chameleon allows enterprise surfers to access external sites and resources without revealing their actual identities (their IP addresses or domain names). According to the vendor, sample uses and users of such technology include competitive and/or covert intelligence gathering, law enforcement agencies, and law firms (i.e. mergers and acquisitions).

The appliance works by establishing an encrypted connection (3DES/AES) to the vendor's own Secure VPN. Web activities are then routed through the Anonymizer network (which the vendor states provides 99% uptime) before being routed to the actual destination address. Before being routed to the destination, however, the Anonymizer network assigns temporary IP addresses which cannot be traced back to the company that originated the request. The traffic is then mixed in with all other anonymized traffic (the vendor currently boasts 2 million other members) and sent along to the destination address for information retrieval, which is then routed back to the original requestor. The vendor notes that the masked IP addresses, as well as associated Anonymizer domain names, are frequently rotated and drawn from non-contiguous IP address blocks.

The gateway-appliance based offering can be centrally managed and requires no client software for deployment. According to the vendor, multiple Enterprise Chameleon models are available, supporting from a few seats on a 256kbps line to over 100Mbps connections for thousands of seats.

While the Enterprise Chameleon is designed primarily for individual analysts executing ad-hoc Web queries throughout the enterprise, the vendor also offers the Intelligence Chameleon Service, which allows for the automated collection of information and intelligence from Web sources--such as is retrieved from Web harvesting operations and/or Unstructured Data Management tools--via anonymous connections. According to the vendor, the Intelligence Chameleon service is able to circumvent site destination tactics such as Web site blocking, "spoofing," and traffic analysis.

The Enterprise Chameleon appliance and the Intelligence Chameleon service are both available now. Enterprise Chameleon pricing begins at $500-700 per seat per year; while base pricing for the Intelligence Chameleon service is $1000 per one million queries (volume discounts are available).