Torres Cultivates MSPs for Managed Bandwidth Optimization

Torres Networks Ltd., a company with operations in Dublin, Ireland and Bangalore, India, is cultivating managed service providers (MSPs) in the U.S. with its bandwidth management products. Here’s some perspective on the strategy.

Torres believes its IP Service Flow Manager and Service Management Platform products give MSPs the ability to add bandwidth management optimization as a business line. The IP Service Flow Manager, a network appliance, offers OSI Layer 4 – 7 traffic detection, policy enforcement for traffic prioritization, and network monitoring among other capabilities.

The Service Management Platform, meanwhile, includes an admission control server that performs authentication, authorization, and accounting.

A. Sivaramakrishnan (Siva), senior product analyst at Torres, said the company’s technology lets MSPs offer three primary services under the managed bandwidth optimization banner. Those are:

As for bandwidth management, Torres employes deep packet inspection to detect traffic, which then can be segregated into business-critical and non-critical categories. MSPs, Siva said, can set policies to prioritize specific applications or give priority to specific users or IP addresses.

Bandwidth monitoring keeps tabs on bandwidth uploads and downloads, Web sites accessed, and applications used over the Internet. MSPs can generate reports to share with customers or for use in network planning. The admission control/access management provides a mechanism for accessing remotely hosted services, the company said. Beyond user authentication and authorization, Torres also provides the ability to track and bill users for every service they subscribe to.

Siva said customers gain the benefit of authentication, while MSPS “get higher revenue by identifying every user” and billing on a per-user basis.

Torres is working with three MSPs in the U.S., Siva noted. It’s still early days, as the company is six months into its MSP marketing initiative. But managed bandwidth optimization and WAN optimization may rate watching as MSPs look to broaden their service portfolios.

Contributing blogger John Moore covers Master MSPs, Web hosts and emerging opportunities. Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center.