Lightspeed Goes Full Speed Into K-12

Company: Lightspeed Systems

Headquarters: Bakersfield, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Total Traffic Control

Year Founded: 2001

Number of Channel Partners: 125 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Education-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Lightspeed Systems has more than doubled the number of its overall channel partners in the past four years and seeks a 100 percent channel-only model for a continued push into the K-12 education market.

The Lowdown: Lightspeed Systems is able to box out a number of its larger competitors in the K-12 education space by offering to school districts what others can't: Total Traffic Control, an all-in-one network efficiency application that consolidates content filtering, mobile filtering, antivirus, spam management, bandwidth management, e-mail archiving, monitoring and other features into one CIPA [Children's Internet Protection Act, required in K-12 settings]-compliant deployment.

More often than not, said Lightspeed President Scott Garrison, Total Traffic Control is installed to replace as many as five disparate systems in a K-12 district, all of which do different things. Since Lightspeed's sweet spot is school districts -- not enterprises -- it caters to a lot of the smaller, regional accounts that its bigger competitors ignore in favor of massive enterprises. It also accounts for shrinking IT budgets and staffs, as it's a lot easier for reduced IT staffs to learn one product instead of several.

Lightspeed Total Traffic Control

The company's products -- Total Traffic Control is its flagship offering and is also available in function-specific modules -- have caught on in the channel, and according to Garrison, about 85 percent of Lightspeed's business goes through reseller partners. The goal, he said, is 100 percent, and the only reason Lightspeed has yet to hit that milestone is that there are certain geographies -- he cited the East Coast, the Pacific Northwest and Canada in particular -- where Lightspeed has yet to recruit and certify many new partners.

"A lot of it is word of mouth," Garrison said. "Most of our partners are regional or statewide network integrators and solution providers. We'll often find partners by doing a deal direct into a couple of their accounts, which gets their attention and they'll say, we haven't heard of you yet and we don't know much about you. We need them -- we need people who are local and can get at areas we can't. We're based in Bakersfield and we're not planning to open another office."

Part of Total Traffic Control is Lightspeed's Educational Video Library, which allows teaching professionals to vet and approve YouTube videos and other social networking content for classroom use, as well as tag and archive those videos to create a teaching library. Garrison said the push toward social networking and Web 2.0 tools in K-12 settings is more significant than ever, in that many K-12 network administrators these days are moving toward an understanding of how 21st century technologies can aid classroom teaching versus the "block everything that might be bad" mentality they previously had.

The plan for now, said Garrison, is to provide unwavering focus to K-12 -- a growing market thanks to the push for IT integration in education settings and outside factors such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which Garrison said has impacted the education buying cycles in a positive way.

"We're growing at about a 30 percent annual clip in K-12, so we think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to become the dominant player," he said. "We're also a private company. We don't have any outside investment capital or have a gun to our head to perform for either Wall Street or an outside board of directors. We think if it ain't broke, why fix it?"