SCIENCE

NETGEAR has announced the enhancement of its business product portfolio with two new offerings that reinforce NETGEAR's commitment to providing smart IT solutions for midsize enterprise customers. The first NETGEAR new offering, ProSupport next business day on-site replacement service, is now included free with a purchase of a mid-enterprise product in the U.S. Additionally, NETGEAR is announcing the availability of the ProSafe 24-port 10GE Managed L2+ Switch (XSM7224S), a 10 Gbps switch that enables businesses to accelerate their data centers to enterprise-class speed, with far less cost and complexity than traditional enterprise vendors.

NETGEAR ProSupport next business day on-site replacement service now dispatches a networking professional to a customer site on the next business day after receiving a service call to have defective hardware replaced. Channel partners may now easily leverage NETGEAR's global support network and expertise to provide upgraded service to their customers without having to pay a high cost.

NETGEAR managed switches are designed for businesses who require enterprise-class performance at a traditional midmarket price. The XSM family can be used as a top of server rack switch, giving a significant improvement in application performance and server response, or as a high performance core switch with layer 3 and 4 capabilities for mid-sized enterprises. NETGEAR's included ProSafe Network Management System (NMS200) gives customers a single, simple interface to discover, configure, monitor and manage all NETGEAR Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches.

Gartner analyst Jim Browning commented, "The biggest challenge midsize businesses have always faced is that they need to deliver IT services with a small staff and limited IT budgets that never grow in proportion to the demands of the business. Post recession, there is a new economic discipline when evaluating IT solutions in the midmarket. While there is no question about whether IT drives value to midsize businesses, there is a question about whether the costs associated with the benefits are reasonable. Midsize businesses are now demanding IT solutions that are designed with resource constraints in mind, have flexible sourcing and deployment options, and are easy and affordable to support post-sale."

"My company relies on me to balance the delivery of high quality IT services and cost control to our customers. The combination of the new switch and free on-site replacement service gives my customers superior uptime without a price penalty, putting NETGEAR at the top of my list of midmarket business vendors," said Michelle Dunn, the VP of Sales at GHA Technologies.

"Customers are demanding Smart IT as a result of an increased focus on costs in the global economic recovery," said Shane Buckley, SVP and GM of NETGEAR's Business Products. "Today's announcements further illustrate NETGEAR's commitment to delivering reliable, affordable, and simple solutions for midmarket business customers."

Pricing and Availability

The ProSupport on-site replacement plan is included at no extra charge with all ProSafe managed switches, ProSafe wireless controllers and selected rack mount ReadyNAS network storage products. This next business day on-site replacement service plan, included as standard during the first three years of the warranty period, is available in major metropolitan areas across the United States, Canada and Europe.  

The ProSafe 24-port 10GE Managed L2+ Switch (XSM7224S) has a list price of $12,090 and a Layer 3 license upgrade (XSM7224L) will also be available for an additional $2,900 in March 2011.