 echannelline.com
30 March, 2009
By Chris Talbot
Ecessa has released a new family of WAN link controllers for the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market.
The new ShieldLink family of WAN link controllers the company is launching builds off of its PowerLink WAN optimization controllers, but with ShieldLink, the company has added firewall and VPN capabilities. According to the company, the additional integrated security features enable customers to save money on implementation, management and maintenance the network while maximizing secure and reliable Internet traffic up-time.
"We want to help businesses get more for less, because that's what small businesses have to do these days," said Jason Breyer, vice president of sales at Ecessa.
According to Breyer, Ecessa offers the same features and functionality of its competitors at a lower price point. With a hybrid go-to-market model, the company sells direct to some customers, but the majority of its business goes through the channel. According to Breyer, Ecessa is also continuing to build up its channel presence.
With success in various vertical industries, including healthcare, education, hospitality, e-commerce, government and legal, Breyer said the ShieldLink products will be of interest fairly horizontally. The WAN link controllers would be of interest anywhere a company wants to aggregate two or more broadband connections while trying to keep their costs low, he said.
Additionally, the ShieldLink products also do intelligent inbound and outbound load balancing to increase performance on the broadband connections, as well as offer quality of service features.
"They want to get better performance, but they can't afford a whole lot more," Breyer said of Ecessa customers.
The controllers can give prioritization to core business needs (such as ERP, CRM, etc.), which Breyer said is a common challenge for SMEs. He noted that the company has a better than 95 per cent customer satisfaction rate, mostly due to the way it works with partners and customer to configure its products to customer specifications before being shipped out. When the controllers arrive, they can just be popped into the IT environment in an almost plug-and-play fashion, he said.
Ecessa also makes its technical support representatives available at the time of installation to help with any last-minute configuration needs to get the ShieldLink products up and running as quickly as possible.
"We're trying to grow high-touch integrators into our channel. That fits best with our model," Breyer said.
For channel partners, the value proposition is really one of value. According to Breyer, Ecessa's products have the same features as competitors, but come in at about one-third the price. The firewall and VPN capabilities open up even more opportunities, he said.
"Those are all opportunities to our partners, and now the ShieldLink opens it up even more to those people who want to consolidate in their network or want to leverage our tech support model and achieve consolidation and savings and management all in one by adding that firewall functionality and VPN functionality, as well," Breyer said.
Pricing for the ShieldLink products starts at $3,495 (US).
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