The Israel-based company that today finalized its $18 million purchase of Nortel Networks Corp.’s Layer 4-7 application delivery business says its plans for the newly acquired products include a focus on connecting to VMware’s virtualization environments, officials told TMCnet in an interview today.
According to integrated application solutions provider Radware Ltd.’s chief operating officer, Ilan Kinreich, plans for the application switching and acceleration products – originally acquired by Nortel (News - Alert) in 2000 by way of its purchase of Alteon – include expanding capabilities in the areas of high performance, high bandwidth and attaching to virtual networks and data centers.
“We’re looking at several other living applications, including VMware, which is optimizing the virtualized data center with our load balancers,” Kinreich said. “As a whole we’ve done a lot in connecting to VMware environments as well as connecting with most leading applications in the market.”
Radware (News - Alert), whose U.S. headquarters are in Mahwah, New Jersey, is implementing a 5-year product support plan for existing customers, and says it plans to keep selling the products under a “Radware Alteon” brand.
That’s welcome news to customers, who say they’re pleased to see Radware’s continued investment in the product line.
“This development commitment, combined with their expertise in the space and support guarantee, gives us confidence that the business and infrastructure interests of our customers will be well served,” said Bernd Schwefing chief operating officer of Controlware GmbH, a Germany-based networking products and solutions provider.
As TMCnet reported, Radware’s acquisition of the products followed Nortel’s bankruptcy filing, and led to rumors that the Toronto-based telecom equipment vendor – the largest in North America – would break itself up by selling off major divisions.
Kinreich described the Alteon customers – formerly Nortel’s customers – as a “combined customer base” with Radware’s own.
“They now have a strong vendor that will provide strong support, and we are executing the continued expansion of their product line,” Kinreich said. “The future, right now, is in engaging with high-performance platforms to upper bandwidths with the product.”
That combined customer base stands to grow exponentially. As Kinreich noted, tens of thousands of Alteon units have shipped around the world in the past five years.
“So that is quite significant, with customers from both a carrier side and large enterprise side,” he said.
Stuart Brown, a product manager at United Kingdom-based Maxima, called Radware’s acquisition “a good sign.”
“Their assurance to evolve the product line and provide immediate, knowledgeable technical support gives us confidence that our customers will be well served,” Brown said.