The profile of a customer in the budget value market and the profile of a customer in a premium market are substantially different in a number of ways.
Premium Customer
Typically, the people that interact with the products are networking-centric people (as opposed to server/application-centric). They may deal with firewalls, routers, and switches in addition to load balancers, or if the organization is large enough, there may be a group who’s time is nearly 100% dedicated to load balancers. They don’t get much into the application or the server area, and the very thought of diagnosing application issues makes them guffaw. They also get blamed for all sorts of problems, whether the problem is related to the load balancer or not.
Their needs are typically very sophisticated, and they’ll squeeze many features, even bleeding-edge features, out of their products.
They will spend buckets of cash on their vendors, once selected, so the local sales team for the vendor is critical. They need well-connected sales people and sharp regional daywalkers sales engineers just to survive in a given regional market.
Vendors support these customers through phone, web, and SEs.
Value Customer
Value customers are typically server and application folk, and are dragged kicking and screaming into networking via load balancing. They can range from small one-man shops to medium-sized businesses. They may even be part of the Fortune 500, but only if the deployment is an ancillary part of their business or operations and for whatever reason, don’t have a strong Internet presence.
Their needs are more basic, so they are well served even if the load balancers don’t have the more advanced features such as web acceleration, caching/compression, etc. They need basic load balancing, and some Layer 7 cookie persistence.
They are very cost conscious, and aren’t the cash cows that premium customers are. However, this is an underserved market, and it’s a market where there is tons of growth, so there’s still plenty of money to be made.
Vendors support these customers by phone and web only, and typically only the phone.
Because of these differences, the two markets have diverged and continue to diverge in the products that they offer, as well as how the customer is engaged.
