Allied Telesyn

+Winning customers with value pricing

Allied Telesyn may not have the instant name recognition of Cisco or Nortel, but the company's Ethernet network and access gear is all over the place. As James Mustarde, the company's vice president of marketing, asserts: "There probably isn't a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have an Allied Telesyn product somewhere."

Grandiose as that may sound, Mustarde's guess is probably true, says Shirley Hunt, a Frost & Sullivan analyst. "The Fortune 500 company may use high-end Cisco equipment in its headquarters office and still use Allied Telesyn equipment in its remote offices, since the Allied equipment is compatible with the Cisco equipment," she says.

Also true is that Allied Telesyn has been in the Ethernet switch business as long as or longer than most networking companies, Hunt points out. The company, a wholly owned U.S. operation of global technology conglomerate Allied Telesis Group, was formed in 1987.

But the company established itself in low-end, small implementations. Only within the last couple of years has it begun ratcheting up with advanced features such as high-speed connections to gigabit and 10-gigabit networks, Layer 3 switching and network management. The kicker is that Allied makes these features available at better prices than higher-end vendors, Hunt says. (Allied's Layer 3 switches range in price from $1,500 to $11,500.) Plus, the Allied Telesyn devices are easy to configure and install, because the equipment itself handles most of the installation.

Allied Telesyn's ability to provide an end-to-end, integrated network, including network management and zero-touch configuration, was a big draw for the city of Loma Linda, Calif., and its unique community connectivity program, says James Hettrick, IS director. In 2003, Loma Linda became the first U.S. city to mandate fiber and structured wiring in any new residential or commercial construction.

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For the project, the city uses Allied Telesyn's iMAP Multiservice Access Platform, iMG intelligent Multiservice Gateways, Layer 3 switches and routers. "When we started this in 2003, we were amazed to find a vendor as far along as Allied Telesyn was with its products," says Hettrick, noting that he was particularly impressed with the vendor's Layer 3 and virtual LAN (VLAN) features.

The modularity of the vendor's products and the low base price also were impressive. "We're not getting stuck committing more than we want to in any fiscal year. It was so willing to make the pricing structure work, and it wasn't worried about selling us a high-dollar maintenance plan," Hettrick says. Though Hettrick didn't specify pricing, fiber-to-the-home customers can get passive optical networking or active setups in the sub-$500 range, Allied says.

Despite such warm fuzzies, Allied Telesyn faces a challenge in growing its enterprise business, Mustarde says. Broadening its product lines to support VoIP and wireless broadband is one way the company expects to boost enterprise sales, he adds. Hunt agrees that those are logical extensions, and says security management would be another important area for Allied Telesyn to consider.

As a company that has made its name as the lower-cost provider, Hunt says, "Allied Telesyn can use the same value-add strategy for security that it uses for other high-end features."

'05 revenue: Not disclosed, though published reports peg revenue at $39 million. (A publicly traded company with revenue in that range would fall in the bottom 10 on the NW200.) '05 revenue for parent company, Allied Telesis Group: $500 million Number of R&D and manufacturing centers: 13 worldwide Number of countries served: 30, on five continents Sample customers: Case Western University, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, McDonald's, Mercedes/Daimler/Chrysler

Network General

+Corporate rebirth

Under the leadership of CEO Bill Gibson, who took the helm in December 2005, Network General is vying to become a leading application and network performance management vendor.

Today's Network General came into being in July 2004, when private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group acquired McAfee's Sniffer Technologies division for $235 million. The original Network General, which developed and then launched the popular Sniffer network management tool, ceased to exist in October 1997 after being acquired by security software vendor McAfee Associates in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. The merged entity became known as Network Associates. While technology development continued - for example, Sniffer Enterprise Management and Sniffer Mobile shipped in 2002 - Sniffer largely played second fiddle to the company's McAfee line.