Working with SMBs? ZyXel Wants Your Attention
Heads up for VARs and partners working with SMBs: If you haven’t given ZyXel a look yet, you might want to read on. They’ve got some interesting UTM (unified threat management) solutions and some margin-increasing incentives if you work with them. Here are the details.
Take note of ZyXel’s ZyWALL USG series. USG (or Unified Security Gateway) is ZyXel’s fleet of UTM solutions scalable for companies with 25 people to 2,000. The USG Series has the advantage that regardless of which box you’re looking to deploy, the feature sets are the same and they’re all running the same software and same interface. If you’re a VAR, that means skills reselling the USG 100 (pictured) translate over to the USG 200 or USG 2000. ZyXel has spent time trying to take the learning curve out of the equation and increase the efficiency of working with their products.
Okay, but what’s included?
- Free Anti-spam
- Subscription-Based Application Control
- Content Filtering (by Blue Coat)
- Anti-virus by ZyXel or Kaspersky
- All boxes support multiple WAN with 3G
They also want to be simple. Shawn Roger, product marketing manager at Zyxel stressed this point. “We’re simpler than SonicWall and Watch Guard…we’re giving full lifetime firmware updates, and life time US based phone support out of the box. There’s no quoting service plants to the customers, no need to confuse customers. There’s also no per-user licensing fees.” He also stressed the 30-day trial program that ZyXel offers. VARs can install the ZyXel USG solution and 30 days later report to the customer how it performed and how many threats, spam and webpages it stopped. “We’ve found a high conversion rate [using this program]” noted Roger.
USG solutions come with a license for Vantage Report, an easy to use program for the VAR/MSP that displays easily understood data about performance using automated pie-charts, graphics, etc… VARs can attach their logo on it to make it official for presenting to their customer.
Through their partner program, VARs receive discounts through distributors Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Wynit, along with potential rebates for VARs direct from ZyXel. Rebates are both instant, and mail-in. Roger also talked up their free online training website with videos and a wealth of other information.
All of ZyXel’s products come with a 5 year warranty and are ISCA certified.
Sounds like working with ZyXel could be a very pleasant experience, but we’d like to ask you, dear reader, if you’ve found it to be so. For those who haven’t been working with ZyXel, have they piqued your interest?
