ABP: DrayTek Routers Address New Business, MSP, Reseller Realities

Specialty distributor ABP was at ITEXPO Miami last month talking about how it is helping resellers more effectively address changing business models and market realities. CTO Henry Castillo spoke on camera with MSPToday Senior Editor Peter Bernstein about how ABP is doing that via the delivery of solutions that cater to the specific needs of resellers and their end customers.

Resellers are increasing becoming managed service providers or being absorbed by other organizations, said Castillo. So ABP is responding to these trends by providing resellers with new brands like DrayTek.

DrayTek is an equipment company that offers feature-rich routers that offer such features as bandwidth management and quality of service, content security management and web content filter capabilities, dual and multi WAN load balancing and failover, stateful packet inspection firewall, multi VLAN, VPN LAN-to-LAN and PC-to-LAN, and Wi-Fi 802.11n with multiple SSID and rate control IPV6. As discussed in an August MSPToday posting, the DrayTek portolio includes routers with multiWAN functionality.

Castillo said that with fiber going deeper into businesses, businesses need a different breed of edge device with a fiber port and enough throughput to handle traffic so the router doesn’t become a bottleneck. Edge routers also need firewall functionality and QoS control to secure and ensure good performance of real-time communications such as VoIP, he added.

In addition to broader functionality, simplicity is also extremely important for resellers and their customers. Castillo said cloud-based solutions can help with that.

Castillo said MSPs deploy multiple routers, and once they have a lot of them in place it becomes a management challenge. So DrayTek has introduced a cloud-based management system that makes router provisioning easy and affordable. As a result, he said, configuration that once required a high-level technician can now be handled with a simple drag-and- drop capability.