Services from Check Point's new division will include consulting, implementation, management, and troubleshooting of its firewall and traffic management products. It has also created the Check Point Emergency Response Force, a team of engineers that will work with customers remotely or on-site to handle critical situations such as hacking incidents or denial-of-service attacks.

Tony Reed, Check Point's vice president for technical services in the company's Redwood City, Calif., U.S. headquarters, said customers had been asking for more support directly from the company for some time.

"Until now, the option of getting support directly from Check Point has not been available to our customers-they've been going to the resellers for support," he said. "Now, we can actually touch the end users directly."

As part of the new service offerings, Check Point will also open a technical support call center and a research lab that will be open 24 hours a day to help major clients. Reed said technicians at the lab would try to duplicate the client's conditions to find solutions to problems as they come up.

Secure Computing's four new offerings are assessment services (including internal and external testing and analysis to eliminate security risks), architecture services to recommend security migration and implementation, network services (including product training and installation), and support services geared to meeting more customer-specific needs.

Ted Julian, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., said the new offerings are both a natural response to customer needs and a desire to increase the companies' attractiveness to larger potential customers.

"There are deals they won't be able to do without adding these services," he said. "All vendors run into this when they start dealing with large vendors."

Julian added that Secure Computing has more of a legacy in offering consulting services than Check Point.