Bojan Simic: One of the things that was mentioned earlier in terms of capabilities and selection criteria that SMBs care more about is flexibility. That is pretty consistent with what we are seeing. When I say flexibility, in many cases it is technology related, but it is also related to the way the organizations do their business and plan their business, in terms of whether their web performance management solutions scale up or down, actually follow the way their business is either growing or going in the opposite direction. Some of the concerns that we are hearing is that "as my company grows, and I bought something that was designed as an SMB solution, do I have to rip and replace that, or is there actually something else that I can do." From a technology perspective and also from a pricing perspective, how can organizations have their solutions kind of grow with them, if you will. How are you all addressing that and how do your customers go about doing these things?

Peter Melerud: One of the key issues is starting from the standpoint of whether or not the solution being deployed is hardware, virtual appliance or whether it is a service, in this case. With respect to hardware platforms, certainly there are some limitations, as far as head room and performance levels, that a particular platform hardware can support. From that respect, there are definitely different ways that both vendors and customers can look at what type of solutions they need. On the virtual appliance side, there is probably a lot more things that can be turned on and off dynamically where customers can dial in the amount of performance they need out of their solutions than out of the hardware platforms, but it really comes down to looking proactively both at the feature set and performance levels. These are two sometimes independent areas to look at. Does the product or solution that I'm looking at have enough feature content that, as our site or application develops in growth, it could support? And the second part of that is, is there performance limitations, and what are the performance limitations, in particular, a hardware solution, and how do we manage those limitations? Do we purchase a model that supports us 1 year, 2 years downstream? So, in that respect, that is where vendors can come into play and really advise the SMBs on various capacities, on both the hardware side and the virtual appliance side, and can help them look forward to that. Different vendors have different stratification models and in terms of how they go about pricing the various elements of their solutions. My best advice would be to engage with that vendor and look at the different options that are on the table and take it from there.

Bill Kish: An important thing for a potential buyer of this type of technology to do before they actually start shopping is to understand what exactly the traffic on their site looks like right now and project it into the future. The hardware devices that we are talking about are really tremendously scalable. Even in our mid range product, we can handle over 50,000 transactions per second of what we call Layer 7 traffic and significantly more at Layer 4. There really aren't that many sites that need that level of performance and you can certainly scale up quite a bit more in the higher end product lines. So, to me, the challenge that we see is when a customer or a potential customer calls us up and says "Help me size a solution" and we say "tell me more about your traffic patterns and characteristics", and if they don't have the answer, it is very hard to help them out. As I said, the products themselves are really scalable and you could probably get into one of the midrange products and be pretty comfortable, unless you are a very busy site, growing orders of magnitude a year, you will be fine for quite a period of time. Virtualization is sort of a solution in a lot of people's minds to this question of flexibility and Coyote Point looks at this primarily from the standpoint of the cloud as it is growing, the cloud service providers and hosting companies that are going to be behind this migration out of the private data center and into the cloud. Those are the people who really need tremendous levels of flexibility. Whether that is handled by allowing you to subdivide hardware and share it among multiple clients, or to be able to spin out virtual instances of an application delivery controller on demand, those are the people who really are going to need that kind of capability. I think that the hardware solutions that we have today, the plug and play boxes, are really the best bet for most of the SMBs and midmarket companies, just because of the simplicity involved. The fewer decisions that you have to make in terms of trying to figure out how you are going to deploy them in a virtual environment, what the interaction then becomes between the ADC instance and the application server instances that are running on the same physical hardware, that adds lots and lots of layers of complexity.

Mehdi Daoudi: On the Catchpoint hand, we provide a service, so it is a little bit different. We have a pricing mechanism and packages that literally allow companies to grow and they start at $99 a month and they can go and spend thousands more a month, so, it is very flexible depending on what they want to do from the monitoring perspective. I am going to agree with Peter, where the biggest challenge, whether they are looking to buy a load balancing technology or something else, the major challenge is not knowing what they actually need and that it is an amazing discovery process for both us and the customer, the fact that there is not much knowledge about what the infrastructure is capable of, what their current needs are, etc.