Opteq iQ (The product) offers a Firewall, Bandwidth Manager/compression, Cache, VPN Security solutions and Real Time WAN monitoring/sniffer. All these modules can run on a single hardware platform. There are three primary market sectors we service, Govt, Commercial, and ISP’s. In fact any organisation that has Internet connectivity or branch links will benefit as Opteq offers multiple solutions on one unit, one service level agreement and overall bandwidth savings.

Opteq secures and accelerates delivery of business critical applications to any branch office or remote user and has installed thousands of appliances worldwide. We are the only vendor to offer both Web Security, email security, load balancing and WAN Optimisation on the same appliance.

The education sector for example is a fast adopter of the technology. WAN Optimisation ensures that teaching programs perform fast enough for students to use online services. We are often called in to help an educational institution that has teaching programs running too slow. This then often expands into controlling abusive content as well.
Universities offer significant opportunities whilst they seek to identify applications and optimally control their WAN infrastructure and are typically price sensitive. Opteq offers the best performance / throughput / price ratio on the market. Special deals are almost always approved for the educational sector. Feel free to ask.

There are still many file and print servers deployed in remote offices throughout the world. This presents a great opportunity for partners to help customers migrate to a centralised server model to reduce TCO, while providing LAN-like performance for users anywhere.

Training sales staff to recognise classic WAN/internet problems and educate the client to understand the causes and relevant solutions is important. Opteq works closely with its partners to ensure new sales staff understand how to identify opportunities by understanding the problems clients face so they are better positioned . We engage on quarterly web based educational sessions of about 30 minutes each to ensure partner sales and technical forces are kept up-to-date. Please let us know if you are interested.

Typically, partners will be working with a customer on an IT project and for example they may add WAN Optimisation to the mix to help the customer realise the full capabilities of their network.

With that in mind, what key questions do partners ask of potential customers?

The most obvious first question: Are you experiencing bandwidth problems?
Other opportunity identifying questions are:
• Do you have application performance issues? (Is your traffic slow?)
• Are you considering WAN acceleration?
• Are you using VoIP, or are you planning to use it?
• Do you need more visibility into your network traffic?
• Are you moving any of your core applications to a web-based delivery?
• Are you concerned about lost employee productivity?
• Are you concerned about the inability to manage the costs of your ISP bill?
• Do you deliver IT services and applications to remote offices?
• Are P2P (peer-to-peer) downloads and media streaming an issue for your company?
• Do you have an application that is performing badly over the WAN?
• Do you currently have file and print servers in branch offices?
• Are you looking at upgrading your WAN bandwidth in the near future?
• Are you having trouble controlling rogue applications?

A favourite analogy is that without Opteq it’s like driving through a tunnel with no lights on: you don't know what traffic is ahead of you or behind you. With an Opteq unit one can set speed limits, set up rules and data will observe the rules of the road. Critical if you are trying to deploy VOIP, VOD or any other latency sensitive business applications.