Oculan Eyes SMB Market

The company this week rolled out the Oculan 100, a network management and security appliance sporting features similar to those found on Oculan's high-end series 250 product but aimed at small and midsize customers--and priced accordingly, said Darrek Porter, vice president of marketing at Oculan, Raleigh, N.C.

The Oculan 100 enables network administrators overseeing as many as 10 servers, 10 network devices and 100 PCs to administer management functions, intrusion detection, vulnerability scans and performance analysis through a single interface. The product offers detailed reports and policy-based notifications. In addition, VARs looking to manage multiple customer sites can do so using the Oculan 100 by installing units onsite and consolidating the interfaces.

Oculan has begun an aggressive channel campaign to promote the arrival of the new system, engaging national VAR and service provider organizations such as the Managed Service Provider Alliance (MSPA) and the ASCII Group, Porter said.

"We are going back to resellers like people in the ASCII Group and the MSPA that we have talked with in the past and re-engage with them. One of the reasons they didn't engage [with the Oculan 250] is they thought the price point was a little higher than they wanted for SMB customers customers," Porter said.

The Oculan 100 starts at $4,995, half that of the Oculan 250.

Assisting the channel with bundled service offering centered around the Oculan product line will also be part of the company's new strategy, Porter said.

"Virtually all resellers want service revenue. And we want to offer them kind of a road map as to how to build service offerings," Porter said.