Educate Your Customers About Load Balancers

Networking VAR International Integrated Solutions (IIS) understands its customers' needs for total network solutions. In fact, it's one of the selling points that helps the VAR beat out its point solution VAR competitors. Case in point is a recent win with a customer that is an online counterpart to retail and institutional clients trading in the foreign exchange (forex) market. The company provides its clients with an online forex trading platform, which provides real-time access to market metrics such as stock reports. The online forex company recently reported 200% revenue growth from 2004 to 2005 and was listed on Inc. Magazine's 500 fastest growing privately held companies.

Due to its growth, the forex company opened a new data center in the third quarter of 2005. IIS received the customer's RFP for its network infrastructure equipment. "One of our network engineers followed up with the customer and asked for more details about their intrusion prevention and detection requirements," recalls Octavio Diaz, infrastructure services manager at IIS. "During the same conversation, he asked whether the customer had any plans for an application load balancer." As it turned out, the forex company was unaware of the capabilities of a load balancer. It was intrigued by the concept of a network appliance that could distribute incoming Web traffic among all of its servers and prevent network bottlenecks and crashes.

Let Your Customer Choose The Better Network Solution
IIS met with the customer and demonstrated Radware's DefensePro security appliance. The DefensePro, which is part of Radware's network solution (called application delivery), includes real-time IDS (intrusion detection system) protection from external threats such as viruses, worms, and DOS (denial of service) attacks. IIS also discussed Radware's WSD (Web service director), which provides local and distributed load balancing functionality. "By the end of the demonstration, the customer changed its original RFP, which focused on IDS/IPS (intrusion prevention system) point solutions from two prominent vendors, to include a proposal for a Radware application delivery solution," says Diaz. Shortly after receiving the customer's new RFP, IIS proposed a networking solution that included two WSD appliances designed to manage the availability and security of the customer's server farms and prevent server traffic bottlenecks. IIS' proposal also included two CertainT 100 application accelerator devices, which feature SSL (secure socket layer) acceleration, HTTP compression, and multiplexing. This enables up to five times greater Web traffic throughput. The final components of the proposed solution were two DefensePro appliances.

"After analyzing our solution and point products from various competitors, the customer selected our solution," recalls Diaz. "The customer's decision was based on the total feature set of the Radware products, which enabled greater Web traffic throughput and scalability compared to the other vendor's products."

The installation took four weeks and earned the VAR $480,000 plus ongoing monthly revenue via a service contract. Just prior to the go-live date for the forex customer's new data center, the company decided to open a disaster recovery center in Florida. Prospects are good that IIS will win this opportunity, which promises to bring in nearly as much revenue as the data center network infrastructure installation.