Toss your Packeteer, says TechPlus

Niche distributor TechPlus has launched a program to encourage resellers to cross-grade Packeteer customers to Exinda Optimiser or Allot NetEnforcer platforms.

In a release titled "Toss your Packeteer", TechPlus Distribution managing director Paul Kern said: "Customers and resellers have long held to the view that increasing bandwidth is the answer to all your WAN woes, but are now realising that this does not fix the problem, rather it reduces the effect it has."

"QoS can actually help remove the issue in the first place by putting business logic into the WAN or internet and ensuring that your business-critical traffic has priority over less critical traffic," he said.

He said the Exinda platform fitted well in the SMB market and scaled from 2MB to 100MB. It appealed to companies that needed a strong Quality of Service (QoS) and substantial reporting and monitoring for their web and internet links.

Allot scaled from 2MB to 2.5GB and was a better fit for customers in the ISP, telco and high-end enterprise space.

"What is unique here is we are offering the same cross-grade program based on different vendor’s hardware platforms which is something only TechPlus can do. We are a specialist QoS distributor with products from a few different vendors," Kern said.

In response to TechPlus’ cross-grade plan, Packeteer acting territory manager Bede Hackney agree the QoS market was heating up competition-wise.

"Frankly, we agree [with Kern’s comments]. We’ve seen the market acknowledge bandwidth is not the answer to all problems," he said.

But Hackney said it was "hard to understand" the benefit of going with the Exinda and Allot products. Packeteer’s new 1200 model costed $2648 for a 128K entry level shaper for SMBs, he said.

Packeteer had put 190 reseller engineers in the last 12 months through free certification and training, Hackney said.

It also offered a "significant pool" of evaluation equipment for the channel. "We’re certainly open to working with resellers that address the SMB market," he said.

Packeteer is distributed through LAN Systems and Express Data.

TechPlus’ Kern was not available for further comment on Monday afternoon.