It’s fascinating what a difference focus makes in terms of market penetration.
Take, for instance, the companies that used to have great focus, but lost it.
- Cisco (ArrowPoint, now CSS, LocalDirector)
- Foundry Networks
- Radware
- Nortel (Alteon)
- Sun (yup, they’ve got a load balancer)
I would even say NetScaler may be on the cusp of losing their focus. In the financials market (wall street, banking, lower Manhattan), they’re about the only company that has come close to challenging F5′s over 80% domination in this particular market. But they’ve somewhat petered off from what I can tell.
All of those companies had great products at one point, and were highly competitive when compared to other offerings. But their companies, usually through acquisition, have let the products atrophy. They haven’t kept up with the market. Prime example: The Cisco CSS, formerly ArrowPoint. It was a great product when Cisco bought them for $8 Billion in 2000, one of my favorites. But aside from SSL acceleration, they haven’t done much with the product. It exists largely as it did in 2000, and we’re in the 3rd quarter of 2007. Any of the value-market load balancers have stronger offerings, and the CSS is not sold as a premium-market product.
Apparently though, Cisco is getting serious again with the ACE platform. Still, I’m still quite skeptical that they’re going to be really serious about the product in the long term. It may even be at parity now, but what about 2 years from now? Load balancing/Application Acceleration/Traffic Management has never been Cisco’s focus. It seems as if they count on the fact that they’re Cisco, and they’re the safe choice. “No one ever got fired for going with Cisco.”
The other companies, they lost their focus. Alteons were also a really great load balancer, so much so they’re still bought/sold on the used market, and are discussed more than any other load balancer on the load balancing mailing list. It’s a shame that Nortel let them atrophy.
F5, for all it’s successes and failures, for all their troubled support, never lost their focus on load balancing. They’ve branched out into other areas, such as security and WAN acceleration (with limited success), but they’ve remained a load balancing company. This focus has rewarded them with a dominant market position in the Fortune 500.
The value market is a bit different. Barracuda, KEMP, and Coyote Point are all highly focused companies, duking it out for market share on the very price conscious SMBs. This is still a growth market, and in terms of focused companies, a far more competitive market than the premium market.
