Coyote Point Systems to woo SMBs 2 April, 2008 By Liam Lahey

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After competing at both the low and high ends of the market initially, the company discovered over time its products weren't very well-suited to large enterprise environments (with 5,000 users or more). The experience was akin to squeezing a size-10 foot into a size-nine shoe apparently.

"However we have very good products that are geared towards the mid-market and that would satisfy 90 percent of the needs of that clientele," said Richard De Soto, vice president of worldwide marketing and sales for Coyote Point. "Since we introduced the (Equalizer) 550, that has become a real hot product in the sense that we have a free evaluation program and we're continually out of (those units)."

The company said its Equalizer Series systems are the non-stop front-end used by over 6,500 customers worldwide, designed to keep Websites and business-critical applications up and running with high availability and accelerated performance.

Thus Coyote Point intends to capitalize on that install base by way of tuning its product roadmap to focus on solutions for what it called affordable disaster recovery and business continuity, desktop and server virtualization, scalable server clustering and the green datacenter.

Instep with its SMB/mid-market aims, Coyote Point said it is growing its' marketing and sales team and expanding channel development initiatives.

To spearhead the effort, the company recently hired De Soto to guide the company's marketing and sales strategies to address mid-market requirements and grow the company's presence with leading channel providers worldwide.

"With their tight budgets and small IT staffs, SMBs and SMEs need plug-in IT solutions that are affordable, dependable, and easy to deploy and manage, combined with local sales and service and ready access to key vendors," he said. "Coyote Point has a leg up on the competition because of our unsurpassed combination of easy-to-use technology, affordable products and excellent service. Now, our challenges are to educate mid-sized companies about server load balancing and the benefits of Coyote Point's solutions and to help our worldwide network of channel partners and solutions providers realize the huge, untapped sales opportunity in the mid-market segment."

Coyote Point subscribes to Gartner's definition of a small business being 100 employees or less, and a mid-sized company between 100 and 5,000 users.

"Our sweet spot is generally 100 to 1,000 users," he said. "In the United States, there are about 270,000 businesses that fit into that . . . user target market."

De Soto has served in executive roles in senior marketing and sales at notable companies including Nortel Networks and Extreme Networks. He's also experienced life as a startup-CEO for firms in application acceleration, mobile convergence, VoIP and in security markets.

"We're one of the few load balancers that can load balance a virtual servers -- both VMware as well as Microsoft 2007 -- and there is a big uptake in the small to mid-market in virtualization," he told eChannelLine. "There's a big market gap . . . in that one of the problems [distributors] have is the product prices are not low-priced enough for lower end, mid-market customers.

"Our disadvantage is we're not as well-known as F5 (Networks). That is one of the things we're trying to solve. This company hadn't really promoted itself online since last October so we haven't gotten out there in a big way."

Working with De Soto, Kat Marquez, Coyote Point's director of corporate and partner marketing, is responsible for the company's corporate communications and awareness initiatives. Marquez would develop online and print marketing programs, lead-generation programs and other outbound marketing activities aimed at increasing awareness with end-users and penetration with channel partners worldwide.

Jim Puchbauer joined the company as director of product marketing and strategic alliances to serve as the company's product evangelist, creating content for end-user and partner programs and developing strategic partnerships.

Coyote Point also has recently expanded its domestic sales team, adding senior sales veterans such as Mike Gomes from Radware and Jay Dosanjh from NETGEAR. These individuals, experienced at recruiting and growing larger VARs, would work to increase Coyote Point's roster of domestic reseller partners, which currently include Dell, CDW, PC Mall and Softchoice.

In Europe, Coyote Point established a new U.K. office headed up by Bill Butt, Coyote Point's new director of sales for EMEA. Coyote Point already has significant presence in Asia-Pacific, including Japan and the emerging market of China, officials said.

On the product front, Coyote Point recently introduced enhancements to its Equalizer Series V8 for Non-Stop Application Availability, Affordable Acceleration & Scalability and Administrator Friendliness, including server cluster surge protection, Akamai compatibility, Microsoft Web Outlook Access support, HTTP compression and several acceleration optimizations. Going forward, the company intends to refine its Equalizer Series products with enhancements for acceleration, bandwidth management, virtualization, business continuity and other key requirements.

"There is an emerging market in the SME space for load balancing and application delivery systems that deliver a good mix of features, price-performance and ease of installation," said Joe Skorupa, research vice president for Gartner Inc., in a statement. "A focus on these customers and associated channels will be a key to success in this market."