PowerDsine Rolls Out PoE for MSPs
Unveiled Tuesday at Interop in New York City, the PowerDsine 6524 is a rack mounted, 24-port PoE system that ships with the vendor's first secure, remote management technology, said Ronen Heldman, vice president of product management at PowerDsine, Melville, N.Y.
"Now, you can remotely manage the system more securely," said Heldman.
Previous PoE products from the vendor had interfaces that could be accessed over the Internet remotely, but did not offer secure SSL VPN protection, he said. The 6524 starts at about $1,199 and begins shipping Feb. 1, he said.
PowerDsine is recruiting reseller partners worldwide, Heldman added. The vendor is a close partner of Cisco, Nortel, and other switch vendors, and a significant opportunity for partners comes from adding PoE to existing switch deployments that do not currently have PoE capabilities, said Heldman. For example, Cisco uses PowerDsine as the preferred PoE upgrade to its In Line Power Patch Panel and other products, he said.
Reseller partners typically enjoy about 30 percent margins on PowerDsine sales, and the average cost of a PowerDsine deployment runs at about $30 per port and up, said Heldman. Sales have been brisk, taking PowerDsine revenue to about $40 million last year, he said.
For customers, the typical return on investment after adding PoE adds up to about a 75 percent savings on the cost of power consumption and hardware management. PoE also reduces the amount of time it takes to get a new network up and running, said Heldman.
"The value of power over Ethernet is the reseller doesn't have to wait for an electrician to arrive before lighting up the network, a wait that can take weeks," said Heldman.
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