The increasing importance of machine-to-machine interactions in distributed enterprises is making networking a crucial infrastructure component for today’s businesses. Companies are facing conflicts – due to existing network bottlenecks – in consolidating business-critical applications to minimize the cost and complexity of data center deployments and ensure application performance and security. To address these requirements, networking vendors have come up with the concept of Application Delivery Networking (ADN), which comprises products and solutions that address the performance, scalability, availability, security and control requirements of today’s enterprise applications and cloud services. Array Networks, based in California, USA, with a back office in Bangalore, helps enterprises, service providers and public sector organizations meet the challenges of delivering applications in these dynamic network environments by making applications more reliable through the combined effects of key networking products. Array’s application delivery controller, load balancing, WAN optimization and secure access solutions provide the tools essential to providing high-performance network connectivity and a seamless end-user experience while simultaneously preventing attacks and data leakage.

The Growth Story
Array Networks started its operation in India in 2008, and is today second only to Oracle in the space of application delivery networking. The company reached this enviable position by focusing on application delivery controllers, placing an emphasis on large verticals like telecom, government and BFSI. Although there was not much activity in the telecom space, concentration on the other two sectors paid off and the company has leveraged its expertise in the government and BFSI sectors. Array Networks won the 'UID' project for Government of India and projects for RBI and SBI in the BFSI domain. The company was agile in comprehending the shift in the approach from IT-infrastructure-centric to networking to end-user-centric networking and worked towards application performance and acceleration. In just two years, Array established itself in the government and BFSI sectors which are providing most of the ADC business in India. The focused strategy was coupled with channel-based model to derive high visibility.

In addition to the channel-based model, Array utilized support services to accelerate and optimize solutions to gain client satisfaction. Three factors, namely strategy, a channel-based model and support, played vital role in establishing the company in the Indian networking market. The integrated team at Array is also a major contributor to its success. “We set up a team who joined us in 2009 and stayed with us this entire time. This was a differentiating factor from an HR perspective as most other organizations were experiencing attrition. We place a lot of emphasis on employee satisfaction to make sure that they stay. Today we have an experienced team and support is something that we really build our strength on. That sums up our success.” says Shibu Paul, Country Manager for Array Networks. The growth story of Array Networks is inspiring for the new entrants in the market and the company continues to take major strides in the networking domain with its portfolio of products.

Array Networks has three product lines which come under the banner of ADN. The first one is the Application Delivery Controller which bridges the gap between enterprise requirements and budgets to cost-effectively improve the performance, availability and security of Web applications and cloud services. Array APV Series application delivery controllers address the challenges faced by enterprise, service provider and public sector organizations in the areas of application and cloud service delivery. The second offering by the company is Secure Access Gateway which addresses challenges faced by enterprise, service provider and public-sector organizations in the areas of secure remote and mobile access to applications and cloud services. Array also provides WAN optimization controllers which dramatically reduce application response times over wide area networks by reducing the amount of traffic that goes over the network between remote offices and data centers. Through these products, the organization is addressing all the pain points of the ADN market.

Array’s ADC positions itself in front of applications and application servers, offloading connection handling and processor intensive functions. The company uses technologies like server-load-balancing to manage multiple servers serving a site and ensure higher reliability. Numerous algorithms are used to streamline the load between all the servers. The data is compressed before it is exchanged between servers and applications, making the application faster. “We are anticipating a huge explosion of data which a normal web server will not be able to handle and there is a growing need for intelligent devices like secure application delivery controllers to manage the deluge of data. This trend is bound to strengthen the number of potential use cases for our products” adds Paul.

Array Networks has oriented its solutions towards improving the performance of applications, lending support and following a channel-based model. As the applications are getting revamped with new technologies coming in, opportunities are up for grabs, encouraging organizations to deliver. From the global perspective, Array considers India as one of the core growth regions and plans more investments in this prospective market.