Expand eyes end-of-life customers

Expand Networks has launched a bid to help its channel partners poach customers affected by end-of-life decisions made by Blue Coat concerning some Packeteer products.

The program was also targeted at customers that were otherwise constrained in some way by the capabilities of a competitor's WAN optimisation product in their environments.

Called the trade-up program, it enables customers "to trade in obsolete and non-integrated WAN optimisation implementations for Expand technology."

The firm's website said the program applied to "all Expand Networks' and equivalent competition products including Juniper, Citrix, Riverbed, Cisco, Blue Coat, Tacit, Packeteer and Mentat."

But Asia Pacific vice president Steve O'Brien singled out Blue Coat, Packeteer, Riverbed and Juniper customers as local targets.

He told CRN that Blue Coat's decision mid last year [PDF] to bring Packeteer products including iShared, SkyX and "elements of its PacketShaper range" to their end-of-life had been a source of "disenchantment" in parts of the channel.

"The end-of-life [decision] had a lot of people coming to us saying ‘Is there anything you can do to help us?'" claimed O‘Brien.

He anticipated the trade-up program would stimulate "additional demand" for Expand's local channel partners.

Partners and their customers would also get "attractive pricing" by participating, O'Brien said.

Customers with legacy WAN optimisation products that wanted to trade-up to Expand kit were first required to register their interest via a loyalty program.

"We then work with the partner and their customer to put a solution together depending on their individual requirements," O'Brien said.

Expand also launched several offers to get its existing customers to expand their deployment of WAN accelerators or to update to the latest models.

The offers were made as part of a new customer loyalty program designed to "help existing customers migrate to the latest Expand technologies", the company said in a statement.

Existing customers were defined as those whose implementations dated back before September 30.

The offers included one year of standard maintenance for free with new accelerator purchases.