Get Allot for free

Traffic management vendor Allot Communications is offering its appliance-based software as a free evaluation to those companies hoping to get a better idea of how their applications consume bandwidth.

PG Narayanan, CEO of Allot’s American operations, says the company wants to show customers how much Allot’s appliances could help IT managers get more from the bandwidth they have or how they could better use the bandwidth to deliver business-critical applications.

“We want to give potential customers an easy-to-install way to see how much applications are using the links, such as what the Citrix app is using, or how much bandwidth is needed for certain applications,” Narayanan says. He says the company will come and install the gear in users’ nets and allow them to see the results. Hopefully, the users will see enough results to decide to purchase the product.

“We are confident that if we give them a free network performance evaluation, they will find areas that can be optimized and we can help,” Narayanan says.

Allot gear can sit between a WAN router and a LAN, and it enforces quality-of-service rules on traffic as it goes by. It can monitor traffic at any network layer and report on top users, bandwidth utilized, bandwidth consumed per application and sites visited by Web browsers, among other metrics.

Typically, pricing for Allot’s NetEnforcer (bandwidth management LAN appliances), NetReality (bandwidth management LAN and WAN appliances) and NetPure (Internet content filtering appliances) starts between around $3,000 and $5,000, and varies depending on network configuration and applications used.