ISP-Planet continues conducting its VPN appliance reviews, evaluating IPsec hardware devices suitable for ISP deployment to broadband-enabled businesses with 10-200 employees. This week, NetScreen presents its comments.

Introduction by Lisa Phifer Core Competence, Inc. [May 16, 2001]

In early April, we initiated this series by issuing a Request For Proposal (RFP). After a long month of vendor emails and phone calls, we've gathered a small but impressive collection of RFP responses.

So far, just four vendors delivered responses that satisfied our RFP: NetScreen, RapidStream, Rebel.com, and SonicWALL. In today's article, we publish a summary of these responses, our commentary on them, and what we learned from issuing this RFP.

Request for Proposal
Our RFP specified managed VPN requirements for IPRVnet, a fictitious regional ISP providing dial, dedicated, and broadband Internet access services to SMBs. We invited 40 vendors to respond to this RFP within three weeks.

A full quarter of those invited did not respond. Another three declined our invitation because they sold VPN software, not hardware. Four cited bad timing - product in redesign or not ready to evaluate. Eight did not see a good product fit or were unable to meet the RFP's mandatory requirements. Others lacked resources to respond at this time.

Our Take On The Turnout
What conclusions can we reach from this? Clearly, we set the bar too high for some. At the top of this list: mandatory remote monitoring and management. But we firmly believe this to be a realistic requirement for any managed service provider. We could also have included software or central-office VPN products. Instead, we opted to focus this series on apples-to-apples comparison of customer premises equipment (CPE).

Our three-week response period proved challenging during a busy tradeshow month. An extended deadline may have netted additional qualified responses. But, ultimately, we believe that insufficient resources and failure to reply are both market indicators. In today's economy, dot-coms and big guns alike are struggling for survival, doing more with fewer bodies and stretching dollars razor-thin. As the tech market shakes out, small VPN vendors are closing up shop or being acquired by large manufacturers with broad focus. Several vendors we contacted cited recent staff turnover or corporate, that is reorganization, as a factor.

Mission Accomplished
Nonetheless, this RFP accomplished its goal. What's the good news for our fictitious ISP? We ended up with four solid proposals that appear—at least on paper—to satisfy IPRVnet's requirements.

Our next step is to put these VPN products to the test. Our planned elimination phase of reader polling to further shrink the candidate list proved unnecessary. Therefore, the products proposed by NetScreen, RapidStream, Rebel.com, and SonicWALL will be evaluated in our lab this summer. These individual product line reviews will be published sequentially, culminating with a comparative series closer.

The Responses
Now let's take a look at the RFP responses that satisfied our baseline criteria. We used three example customer networks to illustrate IPRVnet's target broadband-enabled SMB market. The solutions proposed in these four RFP responses will be summarized in the final feature of our RFP Series of articles reviewing VPNs for Broadband SMBs, which will be published over the next six weeks.