Silver Peak’s plan to tame Kiwi data

Wayne Neich, Silver Peak’s APAC general manager, says the company, which opened its first Australian office in Sydney in October, followed by a Melbourne office in December, will have a New Zealand office within 12 months. "Kiwis like buying from Kiwis and do not always like buying from Australians,” he notes.The company has signed up Observatory Crest as its local distributor. "They are starting to bring on channel partners,” Neich says. He says the company wants to work with about three partners. Asnet has already signed on, and Silver Peak is currently in discussion with an ‘outsourced disaster recovery and cloud services’ company, though Neich says: "We are doing all the romancing at the moment...”"We’re probably looking to develop someone in the outsourcing market in New Zealand as well.” Lost and damagedNeich says several factors bode well for the company. "Like Australia, your bandwidth is expensive.” That expense has prompted companies to seek ‘low cost, high speed services’. "But there’s a reason for that low cost,” he adds. "People can buy high speed services, and they can buy some reasonably priced – but that’s because they’re a lower quality service, with shared bandwidth, shared infrastructure. And the impact of that shared link is that some of that data being sent gets lost or damaged.”Silver Peak founder David Hughes – originally a Kiwi – developed an algorithm to rebuild data packets in the correct order, in real time. "It allows [customers] to save money because they do not need much bandwidth, and also to save money by using lower quality links and still getting high quality service. We think it’s a great value proposition.”The company launched its NX-10K multi-gigabit-per-second WAN optimisation appliance – priced from US$299,995 – last month. Pricing for Silver Peak’s family of physical and virtual WAN optimisation appliances starts at US$9995.While the company has ‘a fair bit of product in New Zealand’, Neich says it has been bought by multinational organisations, largely from the United States. "Our local sales achievement hasn’t been achieved but we’re in that process now.”He estimates the New Zealand optimisation market is worth in the order of US$10 million, all up.