Among the things from last week's Canadian Telecom Summit that Ihaven't written about yet was an interview with Roy Zisapel, presidentand CEO of Israel's Radware Ltd., who chatted with meabout April'sacquisition of Nortel's Alteon layer 4-7 application accelerators andswitches. Zisapel wanted to make sure Canadian Alteoncustomers understand his company has a “very aggressive” roadmap forthe line, which will be a significant part of the Radeonportfolio.
“The purpose is to leverage thetechnologies we have in Radware plus the dedicated engineering toprogress the product line, scale it in terms of performance and addadditional functionality,” he said. The first out will be theRadware-designed Alteon 5412 application switch, which will have four10 Gigabit Ethernet ports – a first – and will boost performance up toeight times faster than the exising top of the line model. It will alsobe fully compatible with existing Alteon models. “From the hardwarepoint of view it's a high-end Radware application switch, and we'reintegrating the Alteon code on top of that,” he said. The 5412 performsdata centre server load balancing and application optimization.
Thatwill be followed in the first half of 2010 with a major feature releasethat will boost the acceleration and server offloading capabilitiesof the Alteon line. “We're going to take the product line from serverload balancing and some acceleration capabilities, and we're going toenhance it with Web compressing, caching, image optimization,leveraging technologies we have in the company.”
In the shortterm, to show how serious it is about Alteon, Radware has stuck afive-year warranty on Alteon products and increased Alteon customersupport by not only hiring Nortel's staff familiar with the line, butalso third party Alteon specialists to bring the number of supportstaff to 55. To work on developing the Alteon line itself, Radwareadded 50 engineers to bring the total developers to 80. Alteon researchand development, which under Nortel was based in India, is now alsobeing done in Israel. Manufacturing, however, will continue to beoutsourced to companies like Flextronics.
Radware, which lastyear had just under US$100 million in revenue, has been doing businesshere for eight years, according to Nigel Hall, the Toronto-basedregional VP for carrier and enterprise sales. About 65 per cent of itsCanadian business comes from enterprise and the public sector, whilethe rest of the customers carriers. Customers include Bell Canada,Telus, Great West Life and Enbridge.
Zisapel said the Alteonline is a “very good fit” with Radware's other products, which includeVirtual Director, a quality of service monitor, and AppDirector, anintelligent application delivery controller, because there littleoverlap.