ADTRAN launched their road show across the U.S. early this year and held one in Baltimore that I attended. Here's a report.The folks at ADTRAN are keeping close to their vests the details on their intentions for large enterprise. They plan to introduce products in the chassis space which means more and welcomed competition for Cisco, HP, Juniper and Extreme Networks. ADTRAN's core strengths are reducing costs, complexity and energy consumption while improving productivity and service levels for end user companies and installing VARs, dealers, Interconnects, and MSPs. I've mentioned before some of their secret sauce lies within their power supplies, and that they design. Their products have a power factor of .93 or higher.
In a couple of weeks customers can expect their new AOS (ADTRAN Operating System) 17.5 and with this release comes the energy matrix to power down PoE ports on a schedule. This capability isn't what makes any product green--it's a great feature but because ADTRAN's engineers are and have been performance/efficiency minded all along, high power factor of the gear is the underlying foundation that supports their claim to green. A switch can power down PoE ports to save energy, but that alone doesn't make the switch green. ADTRAN has done very well here in that they do both.
Then, ADTRAN is also expanding their IPT 7100 platform to 100 users from 50. The 7100 is SIP based and cuts costs like a sharp financier would take a liking to, by the integration of router, firewall, PoE switch, telephone system including voice mail and automated attendant, media gateways and onboard VQM (Voice Quality Monitoring) ADTRAN has a very promising future with the 7100 because it will obliterate many products on price and performance and then nail the deals with value. Their stuff works and while robust telephony features aren't present today, there are in fact organizations that don't need or use all or some of those features. I also think that more features will come, just not at the pace that some folks are used to. Secondly, ADTRAN's VQM is built around SIP and you can bet that this alone will eventually seal deals. SIP and SIP services aren't any easier to support. Unlike the competition, ADTRAN it seems has built a platform that is capable of support and being supported by its toolset and in hope, it's akin to: build it and they will come. Hopefully the features will follow too.
ADTRAN also made mention that they also plan to introduce products that scale smaller, which sounds like they want to enter the space of Netgear and Linksys.
I panned the crowd and there were few seats available. The theme was Real People, Real Networks and to quote one happy ADTRAN customer, Rachelle Osborne of WESCO: "We had concerns about not using Cisco. ADTRAN has done everything they said they could do."
