Bojan Simic: Looking back at some of the survey data that we have and looking at the numbers of availability versus response times especially in the area were folks are using their websites to generate revenue, a lot of people in that area have figured out how to deal with availability issues. Looking at the survey data, the average was just over 99% availability per year, but if you look at the issues with response times, even though they have less of a business impact per incident, they are much more likely to happen and they happen 10 times more often than issues with availability. If you do the math and see how much organizations are losing per minute of downtime versus per minute of slowdowns and multiply that over the course of a year, there is much more being lost because of issues with response times. Calculating the ROI with solutions like that, a lot of organizations do not have visibility into what is that business impact. Bill mentioned earlier, investment for basic capabilities, depending on the size, can be anywhere from $3,000-12,000. If that is my investment that I am looking at, am I losing enough to be able to justify that investment, and how do I actually go about calculating that? Thinking about your customers in the SMB space, how often is it that they have some type of internal process in place and say OK, this is approximately how much we can lose if these things don't work well and this is the investment that we are looking to make to ensure that doesn't happen. Do you see your customers in the SMB space actually going through that process?

Bill Kish: Our customers tend to be reactive, rather than proactive. In other words, they've just incurred a situation where either an application was down for an unacceptable period of time, and somebody woke up and said we have to do something about this. As a result, they are out researching solutions. I think that it's not too difficult to make the decision about whether you want to spend a couple of thousands of dollars for a company where your productivity really depends so heavily on these web-based or client-server based applications. At Coyote Point, we have a number of internal web facing applications for doing CRM or for doing our order tracking and management in our production lines and those applications are really mission critical and every time we are able to speed them up, even by a few seconds, by deploying new front-end technologies, or by deploying different enhancements on the servers, you can tell there is a market improvement in efficiency and even moral among the people that have to use those technologies. So, it's not always a hard dollars and cents. A lot of times, it's just about the feeling of whether or not your business is flowing smoothly or not. The same also goes to the outside users who are on the internet, visiting a content site, visiting an ecommerce site, or what have you. If that feels like its not a smooth experience, they have a lower level of confidence in your company. What is that worth? It's worth a lot.

Bojan Simic: Your companies have a strong presence in the SMB market, but you also have a number of large customers across many industries. If you wouldn't mind sharing with us some key differences as they go through the selection process evaluating any solution, how is the selection process of SMB companies different from that of large enterprises?

Peter Melerud: One of the key differences is in the focus on the ease of use on the initial CAPEX and OPEX expenditures. For the SMB, they usually don't have the expertise in house to sometimes handle the sort of brand that the enterprise folks look into. So for them, having a part of this is very simple, easy to deploy, easy to manage and certainly the cost side of it becomes a very important criteria. Lately, we've seen some of the higher-end customers, customers that are traditionally classified in the enterprise space, who are starting to look at the same type of criteria more closely. They will question whether or not they need certain niche functionalities that are built into some other products. For example, do I really need Layer 7 functionality in the ERP system that I don't have today? And do I need to spend 5, 10, 15 times more on that? That idea seems to be increasing, that type of selection criteria is becoming more prevalent, not just in the SMB space, but in the enterprise space as well.

Mehdi Daoudi: What we are seeing, at least on the smaller side of our customers, is that they are looking for simplicity. They want a tool, they want a service that is simple to use because they don't have the same manpower that larger companies have. They want simplicity without losing too much functionality. They want to be able to do what the big guys are able to do, but without having very advanced users on the payroll. The other thing that we see, that is very critical for the small business, is service. They want to have the ability to have someone help them, not only implement, but also drive the implementations. Say this is one way of doing it, but based on our knowledge and history, these are some things that you can do better. So they are very thirsty for knowledge, and actually compared to bigger companies, the small and medium businesses are much more flexible, so you can work with them in a more efficient way to implement your solution and they get more bang for the buck.

Bill Kish: I agree with you as well, particularly on the flexibility end of things. Smaller companies tend to be much more willing to experiment to try different technologies and different types of solutions to solve their problems, whereas larger enterprises typically go after an approach where they analyze the feature set of the market leader, probably the most expensive leader in the market, build a checklist of features that they would like to have based on the most advanced features and then go out for bid with all of those features. The sad part about this is that we all seem to realize that it leads to environments where these larger companies have to throw a large amount of human resources at managing these specific technologies. One of our customers actually had somebody on their staff whose title is load balancing architect and does nothing but worry about how to deploy load balancers within their network. So, that is something that an SMB or a midsize company definitely can't afford to do. They'd like this to be a solution to a problem, not a problem in itself and not a challenge in itself.

Bojan Simic: Going back to some of the things that were mentioned earlier, Bill mentioned some of the pricing points for basic capabilities and Peter mentioned, using the example of Layer 7, that maybe that is a capability that some SMB companies can't afford. Just to clarify these things from a technology perspective, if you are an SMB company and you are trying to gain some of that insurance, what are some of the top 2 or 3 technology features that are "must haves" for them?

Mehdi Daoudi: One thing we build at Catchpoint is a lot of flexibility just to be able to handle their needs and not penalize them from a pricing prospective, though they can chose and pay for what they really need. But at least from a monitoring prospective, the things that we highly recommend to them are the concept of uptime, so you at least you know if you are up or down. Then we try to encourage them as much as possible to be able to understand their performance, which tends to get a little bit more expensive, obviously. But these are the 2 things we try to push them for and then obviously you have all kinds of other solutions, like being able to understand the impact of third parties on your website or your DNS infrastructure on your website. So all of those require different types of modules, but we do not push them, but we highly recommend that at least you know whether you are up or down and how fast you are because those are the 2 key metrics as a company that you need to have.

Peter Melerud: From a standpoint of basic features that an SMB would need, I'd like to say that it varies a bit among customers depending on the applications that they are deploying and running but if you were to bring it to a higher level, higher availability certainly is at the top end of the requirements; making sure that the appliances that they deploy are able to sustain the kind of bandwith and throughput and provide the kind of high availability that the infrastructure is requiring. More specifically, probably a lot of sites these days, especially the ecommerce, are depending on SSL encryption/decryption. Certainly products that can off-load or accelerate applications that are behind SSL would be key. There is a number of other technologies that ADC's deploy that SMB's could certainly leverage. Caching and compression are things that come into play and could certainly help quite a bit in accelerating performance of their sites.

Bill Kish: It's interesting how the combination or the overlap of the types of work that each of our companies do actually impact the way in which you deploy application delivery controllers and load balancers and things like that. Monitoring is what Catchpoint does and it's also very critical to the application delivery controller. If its one important feature set that an application delivery controller should have, it is a good monitoring infrastructure that allows it to determine, not only when a given application incident is available on a server or a given server is available, but also try to figure out when a given server is overloaded so that it can back traffic off from that server. By doing that monitoring and then that proactive adjustment, servers no longer reach the point when they are going to crash and your option is to work around them until they come back up. You can actually prevent the server from reaching an overload condition. So, I think that those sorts of technologies are very important and all of the other types of add-on features that turn a load balancer into an applications delivery controller become important, depending upon the type of business and types of applications that you are delivering. As Peter mentioned, SSL acceleration is very important, it has a high ROI because it can be very expensive to deploy enough servers to handle all of the SSL traffic that you need. Whereas if you have hardware acceleration on your applications delivery controller you can deploy less expensive and fewer servers. Also, the compression technology that Peter mentioned can allow you reduce the amount of bandwith that you need to purchase from your ISP and, as a result, you can reduce the amount of expenditure that you have for that kind of infrastructure and that can pay for itself very quickly. So, all of these sorts of things are things that companies can look at and consult with vendors and try and figure out which feature sets and which products can provide best end results for them, whether their goal is improving reliability, reducing overall capital expenditures or recurring expenditures.