Network Computing: DrayTek has been going for almost 25 years - how has the industry changed over that time? Is networking these days more about management and monitoring tools - perhaps via the cloud - more than specific hardware offerings?

Alex Shuker: The focus for DrayTek has always been around providing solutions to the issues and challenges that businesses - and individuals - face. That is at the root of most of our product offerings - we champion solutions for business connectivity. From our point of view the focus has always been on providing the right router, access point or switch at the right time, but also crucially the additional services around that product. A lot of our core users are businesses who are installing networks for other organisations, and they bring their expertise in how to get that network working optimally, allowing those end users to focus instead on what they do well.

A significant development for us is our central cloud-based management system. Customers can use it to connect to devices, and we enable them then to offer a service monitoring and managing those devices. This helps our customers to build the right service package for their clients around our management offering. Managed Service Providers may be offering a cloud service, but at some point in the process there is still that physical connection - and that's where DrayTek fits in, providing that equipment and supporting services. In that sense I guess we still have that hardware aspect at our core.

A lot of what we supply could be described as 'commoditised' to an extent - once you have that physical connection, a large part of the job is done, if you like. But we also have a unique focus on configuration flexibility, quality and reliability, and that is an area where we stand out in the market.

NC: How important is it for a company like DrayTek to be seen as a solution provider as opposed to just a hardware vendor trying to shift boxes?

AS: The ideal story for us, obviously, is when someone puts in a DrayTek router or access point or switch, and they don't have to ever think about it ever again, and they can forget it's there. But increasingly nowadays people are offering services based on knowing how your network is performing, improving visibility of exactly what is being used - so we're seeing a migration more toward the SD-WAN side of things, toward application awareness. That's why it's so important for us to have this central management platform that offers the analytics and insight into the network, via an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard.

This means that MSPs and IT companies can see exactly what kind of traffic is on their networks, but also - as people are now consuming a lot more cloud services - it allows them to see not just that the connection is there and working, but how well it is working. If we're talking about a business's CRM system or their ordering system or their phone system, you simply can't have any latency or packet loss because that means you'll end up with a client on the other end of the phone who can't hear you, or experiencing long delays trying to navigate through screens. So the demand increasingly is for the ability to look at the quality of a connection, and to move seamlessly across to a different connection if necessary.

We can easily show users not just that a connection is up or down, but also if it goes below a specific quality measure that they have set. As users increasingly demand that better service quality as well as visibility and awareness of exactly what's going on within their networks, that is what really drives us forward as a company in terms of the features and functionality we offer to the market.

NC: The pandemic has obviously changed the way large numbers of us do our everyday work: what effect has the growth in home-working had on the roles of network managers, and by extension on companies like DrayTek?

AS: People who are fairly tech-literate will already be aware of the need for backup strategies such as mobile broadband in case of a bulldozer up the street cutting off your broadband connection, so that core set of users already know what they can do if a connection goes down. But since the Covid crisis there is a whole set of users who have been put into that environment and are only just beginning to appreciate how integral those connections are to them being able to do their jobs properly. As a result we've seen a lot of people showing interest in backup and failover solutions for their home broadband.

That shift has also helped people move towards awareness of the need for failover, for the ability to automatically go from one connection to another without the user having to actually change anything. If this all happens in one box, it will fail over automatically, fail back, and report in, so the company proactively knows that a particular element has gone down. If it's working well of course, the user site shouldn't even notice, but you need to know so you can maintain the service at its best: that reporting aspect is absolutely vital, even if it is happening 'behind the scenes' as far as the user is concerned.

Covid has brought with it new and different types of stresses and demands - for example, previously there would have been large numbers of workers in say Accounts who'd never need to work outside the office, but now suddenly the number of VPN users was expanding to cover almost the entire workforce. So we have had lots of calls about that aspect of performance, about how many concurrent users they can have on the VPN. And I'm glad to say that we had a lot of very relieved customers, as we explained that it was generally just a matter of creating more profiles rather than having to buy a new tool. As time has gone on, that kind of thing has become a core part of customers' purchasing decisions: can they add on remote users in increasing numbers, can they kit-out home users with a router than includes all the failover functionality rather than having to rely on their home broadband connection.

We're seeing a shift, I believe, from a largely reactive stance - "This is the situation we find ourselves in, what do we have to do to adapt and keep going?" - to a more forward-planning approach as businesses try to balance out the benefits and drawbacks of a workforce that looks to expect much more flexibility going forward.

NC: The analogue telephony service is scheduled to be switched off in 2025, which is not that far away now - is it something your partners and/or end users are prepared for? AS: It's a conversation we've been having with MSPs for some time - they will be offering a complete package of broadband, phone line and more, and in the past they would be purchasing the telephone line and internet connection from Openreach, to be delivered on the same line. When the 'stop-sell' happens, MSPs will have to think about how they will offer phone services.

Obviously in some ways the goalposts have moved - again in large part due to Covid - as services like Teams and Zoom have become more core to how many organisations communicate. Nonetheless most businesses will still have a need for some kind of phone system, so there is some debate going on about how best to deliver that.

One approach is to ensure that the router itself offers a good enough connection for voice, and have failover and ways of monitoring the service to make sure that the quality is up to scratch. One specific feature of our Vigor-ACS 3 SD-WAN is the ability to monitor the MOS (Mean Opinion Score) of the connection, so if that value drops below say 3.5 out of 5, then you are alerted that the quality of that connection isn't good enough for voice any more, and it needs to failover to a different connection.

DrayTek also offers products with built-in phone ports, so the router connects to an analogue phone, and then to a SIP service, so that can be used just as a standard phone or to replace legacy systems. In the longer term of course everyone will move to IP solutions for voice, but for people with existing legacy systems they may have elements - analogue based PBX, or doorphones, for example - that they can't easily migrate across, where they need a phone port to plug into. We're working hard to ensure we have solutions that our partners want to recommend to their users, whatever their requirements. NC

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