NetScreen has found a way to offer customers both IPSec remote access and browser-based remote access: by buying SSL remote access vendor Neoteris.

The deal announced Monday for $245 million in stock plus $20 million in cash gives NetScreen technology that can complement its well-established IPSec capabilities for making secure connections over the Internet.

NetScreen, which is habitually ranked among the top IPSec VPN vendors, and Neoteris, which many analysts credit with being at the top of the admittedly young Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) market, expect to complete the deal by the end of the year.

Other major IPSec vendors that have already attempted to add SSL to their technology include Check Point, Nokia and Nortel, with Cisco’s Web site promising that the company will make its SSL plans known this fall.

NetScreen plans to sell Neoteris’ IVR appliances as is, with no plans to integrate hardware with NetScreen IPSec equipment. It says customers prefer separate devices. Short-term, the Neoteris name will remain linked to the SSL products, but that could change.

NetScreen plans to integrate management of the two lines of equipment, giving users a single view of user security policies, but the company has no timetable for that integration.

Both IPSec and SSL support single computers connecting to corporate networks over the Internet, the major difference being that IPSec always requires separate client software on the remote machine. SSL, because it operates at the application layer, can offer finer control over what applications, files and other resources remote users are allowed to access.

SSL can support many applications that are Web-based using just the SSL capabilities found in standard Web browsers. By downloading a software agent, the browsers can be given support for network-layer access via SSL, making the user experience seem as if the computer is attached directly to the corporate network.

NetScreen has been looking around for an SSL company to team up with for a while. Last year, the company announced a joint sales agreement with SafeWeb under which the companies were to push each other’s products when customers seemed interested. For months now, one of the most prevalent rumors in the industry is that NetScreen was about to buy an SSL remote access vendor, with the name of the vendor changing frequently.