Rohati Systems

About Rohati Systems

Rohati Systems, Inc. operated as a specialized provider of agent-less access management solutions for enterprise data centers. The company was founded in 2006 by a team of five former Cisco engineers: Prashant Gandhi, who served as President and CEO, Abhijit Patra, Anant Thakar, Kirti Prabhu, and Nagaraj Bagepalli. This founding team leveraged their extensive background in network engineering from their time at Cisco to address what they identified as critical gaps in traditional firewall and identity management systems.

The company's core business centered on providing granular, network-based entitlement control, allowing organizations to define, enforce, and log access policies for applications and file shares from a centralized console. Rohati targeted large enterprise clients, particularly those within the Fortune 500, who needed to manage complex access rights for employees, partners, and customers without undertaking costly and time-intensive modifications to their existing applications or deploying software agents on servers. The business model revolved around the sale of a hardware appliance, the Transaction Networking System (TNS), which was deployed within the client's data center.

The TNS platform was Rohati's flagship product, designed to provide entitlement control on a per-transaction basis, a significant departure from the broader, less specific controls of traditional perimeter firewalls. Its key feature was the use of Layer 7 access-control lists to enforce fine-grained policies, enabling secure collaboration and controlled access to resources like Microsoft SharePoint. A primary benefit was its agent-less architecture, which dramatically reduced deployment complexity and cost, as it required no changes to the network, servers, or applications it was protecting. This approach was particularly effective for securing emerging virtualized data centers and cloud environments. In late 2009, after securing approximately $23 million in venture capital from backers including Matrix Partners and Foundation Capital, Rohati Systems was acquired by Cisco. The entire team was integrated into Cisco's Nexus product group, bringing their journey full circle.