Arbor Networks, the security division of NETSCOUT, and the market leader in the DDoS protection space, has announced a major expansion of their presence in the SME market. They are packaging the same level of DDos protection they give to carriers and large enterprises into appliance, VM and AWS instance form factors.

“We think its important that all enterprises on the on Internet have DDoS protection,” said Sean Brady, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Arbor Networks. “Bad guys don’t care about a company’s size.”

Arbor Networks’ strength has historically been at the high end of the market, particularly in the carrier space. About two years ago, they radically refreshed the portfolio, increasing the capacity to scale by 4x while reducing their cost by 3x. That has helped broaden their penetration down within the enterprise, to the point where today about half of their revenues come from service providers, and half from the enterprise market.

“Arbor has a rich history of serving the large Tier One carriers, but we have been able to go lower in the market, particularly through managed services,” Brady said. “With the addition of these three deployment options, we feel we now support the whole gamut of how organizations want to deploy DDoS protection.”

The target market for this is the SME segment of the market – not small businesses per se. All three form factors do, however, have the same functionality as the service provider offering.

“These offerings have exactly the same functionality and capability of our Arbor Networks APS, but are scaled to support connections of smaller sizes, for SMEs – substantial businesses – that have a commitment to being on the Internet,” Brady said. “We believe the price will be competitive for these customers. We allow entry into the market starting at $8000, which for the level of functionality we provide is a very attractive price point to enter at.”

Arbor Networks is also emphasizing that these three new offerings are designed for smaller IT teams with limited resources to be able to use. They have a ‘plug and play’ design, with extensive automation,  that make them easy to deploy using the default settings, even during a DDoS attack. Fine tuning of protections specific to a network beyond the defaults is also easily done.

Arbor Networks goes to market entirely through the channel, and believes that their existing channel will be more than capable of selling to the SME sector of the market.

“Our top partners in Canada are Optiv, Scalar Decisions and Telus,” Brady said. “These kind of partners easily reach into this market, and the new offering is designed to accommodate channel partners of all sizes. We see service providers like Telus as a major route to market for this, because one of the things this does is give service providers an upsell to their customers.”

Brady said that the company has high expectations for the new offering.

“This is a release we are really excited about,” he stressed. “There is strong pent up demand, and  significant demand around the world. 60 per cent of our business is outside North America, and we expect that this will do well there.”