Ecessa Touts Necessity Of WAN Optimization

Company:

Headquarters: Plymouth, Minn.

Technology Sector: Networking

Key Product: PowerLink and ShieldLink

Year Founded: 1968 as Astrocom; relaunched as Ecessa in March 2009

Number of Channel Partners: 500 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Small-business-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Ecessa partners can expect to maintain strong margins while offering clients a fully functional WAN optimization product that will help create redundancy and failover protection.

The Lowdown: Ecessa Systems takes its name from the middle of the word "necessary" because the company believes fast and reliable WAN infrastructure is crucial to business. Currently, Ecessa offers two WAN optimization products to solution providers at fixed prices that promise good margins.

Ecessa's products, PowerLink and ShieldLink, offer solution providers and end customers affordable inbound and outbound failover as well as load balancing for multiple Internet connections, said Jason Breyer, vice president of sales for Ecessa.

"We're seeing a trend of consolidation in the market," Breyer said. "With our products, customers don't have to invest in multiple devices and multiple support contracts."

According to Breyer, Ecessa is finding success with partners and end customers by paying attention to details. The in-house support staff promises a guaranteed callback within 15 minutes, and the people answering the phones are all network-degreed engineers.

The company's no-haggle pricing and deal registration also should attract partners because they guarantee margins for solution providers and eliminate channel conflict, Breyer said.

"No one in our channel does any discounting on our products," Breyer said. "It's not like a solution provider will start negotiating with a customer at 40 points of margin and end up at two points because of the competition. Deal registration eliminates that competition. And our no-haggle pricing maintains margins."

Ecessa also invests time in solution providers, walking them through setups and configurations for individual customers. Breyer says that if there is a problem that could crop up during installation, Ecessa and its techs have seen it.

"That model is our pixie dust. There have been attempts by the competition to copy it, but they haven't gotten it right yet."