Two Markets Reminder
As I’ve stated before, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the load balancer/application delivery market is actually two separate markets: The enterprise market and the value market.
The first market, the Enterprise market, is the one most are familiar with. Dominated by F5, Cisco, and a handful of others, this market caters to Fortune 2000 companies. Features, performance, and of course price, tend to be pretty high in this market.
The second market caters to the SMB, and has been given the named “value market” (originally I called it the budget market, but I’m guessing vendors wouldn’t like the somewhat negative connotations this might have). This market emerged in around 2004-2005, and came about as an alternative to the aging fleet of Alteon and other eBay used boxes that the SMB feasted on. The features are more basic. Generally, these devices have the same features and power as the enterprise market had in 2000. While insufficient for most of the Fortune 2000, it’s perfect for smaller SMBs that need some of these featuers, but can’t afford the five figure price tag the enterprise market has.
Generally vendors operate in one market or the other, but not both. The value vendors lack some of the high-end features the enterprise vendors have, and the enterprise vendors don’t want to (nor would they ever need to) undercut themselves by lowering prices to levels that the SMB could afford.
The needs of the enterprise (high-end features, high capacity, on-site consulting) and the needs of the SMB (basic feature set, sub-200 Mbps capacity, low cost) are vastly different.
[...] is a member of the value market vendors, and their LM-1500 is what put them on the map. Released in late 2005, the $2,500 price tag gained [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 12:49 pm