In the private sector

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.