SlipStream Courts Wholesalers

The number two dialup accelerator is reaching out to small ISPs directly and through wholesalers, and has made its own-branding program amenable to ISPs of all sizes.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 26, 2003]

Waterloo, Ontario-based SlipStream Data has announced some significant customer wins recently. The company has been gaining small ISP customers by actively courting dialup wholesalers. The company's ten wholesaler customers are: Argent Solutions, CISP, Dialup USA, GlobalPops, IKANO, O1 Communications, Pacific Lightnet, StarNet-MegaPOP, USPops, and VCI.

"IKANO was our first large account," explains Ron Neumann, president of SlipStream. He says that although small ISPs are valued customers, his company closes about half of the deals it negotiates. "Many go to a wholesaler. We'll gladly put them on to a wholesaler if that's what they want."

It works out for everyone: SlipStream has fewer customers to manage, the wholesalers get additional customers, and the ISP get a long-term relationship with the accelerator company and the wholesaler.

SlipStream has always targeted ISPs rather than end users. "Our marketing support is different than someone who might potentially compete with the ISP by going directly to end users."

For example, Neumann says the product can be branded very easily. "We encourage ISPs to be inventive in how they market."

In a previous article, we reported that the company's accelerator has several advantages over the competition. It is designed to display text first, meaning that customers stare at a blank screen for a shorter period of time. Neumann adds that the software's footprint is small, at about 6 MB.

Last of all, and perhaps most important, the SlipStream accelerator speeds up e-mail in addition to Web traffic. "It's not easy to do. You have to work with firewalls, virus software, and mail clients. You need to recognize a mail request from the mail client in order to accelerate it."

"ISPs want a brandable product. They know that e-mail sells," says Neumann, highlighting the two factors that make his company's product most attractive to ISPs.

SlipStream has two additional features that will catch the attention of specialized ISPs. For Macintosh-only ISPs, the company offers a Mac version of its product. "We have Mac-only ISP customers through wholesalers," says Neumann.

ISPs with corporate clients may be pleased to hear that the company's accelerator also works on PDAs. "That's big with corporate customers," says Neumann.

SlipStream is growing around the world. "We have customers in Portugal, Spain, India, New Zealand, Turkey, and Columbia," says Neumann, reeling off the country names that come to mind.

SlipStream clearly sees Propel as its key competitor, even though there are now many other accelerator products on the market. The company commissioned research from VeriTest to compare the performance of the SlipStream and Propel clients.

For Web acceleration, SlipStream did better when the cache was unpopulated, but Propel, with its larger footprint (162 MB for Propel as opposed to 6 MB for SlipStream), performed better when the cache was populated. SlipStream, of course, also had e-mail acceleration. Both Propel and SlipStream offer ad blocking and pop-up blocking.

Mega customer
We wanted to speak to Russ Intravartolo, because the last time we spoke to him, he had chosen Propel exclusively for his ISP customers. Intravartolo is president of StarNet-MegaPOP, a dialup wholesaler.

The company is now offering both Propel and SlipStream to its customers. "We deployed it because customers asked for it," explains Intravartolo. It is no small investment. The company has deployed SlipStream servers across its own network (it had already deployed Propel servers).

Intravartolo says that some customers prefer SlipStream's own-branding to Propel's co-branding, where the Propel name appears on the client. "Accelerators have been giving ISPs the choice of own-branding, and they have come to want it," he says. He adds that e-mail acceleration is also an important selling point.

The wholesaler is offering Propel and SlipStream at the same price to prospective ISP customers.

— End