IT Pros in LATAM rely on CLAdirect for a Resilient Out-of-Band Solution

Background

CLAdirect is a technology solutions provider with extensive experience in Latin America and the Caribbean. They design and implement innovative solutions for business and advanced infrastructure, that leverage cutting-edge technology. They have wide-ranging experience developing and designing very complex engineering solutions that go all the way from security to routing and switching and to access connectivity.

Isaac Shemaria, a Technology Solutions Sales Architect at CLAdirect, provides consultancy services to ISPs and enterprise customers. In this capacity, he partners to sell Opengear devices to the enterprise market to ensure Out-of-Band management. He finds that the enterprise market really likes Opengear products because they’re easy to use. Of his enterprise customers he adds, “The first thing they buy from us are Opengear devices.”

Opengear Saves Time and Money

Opengear saves CLAdirect’s customers time and money. Many of his customers install Opengear products in IT rooms in locations where they don’t have personnel available. This removes the burden of having to send a person to the site to fix the issue when the connectivity goes down. Opengear devices give the operations team direct access to any IT room in the company, and the ability to control the network from their headquarters. It saves them time because they don’t have to send someone to the site to fix an issue when the connectivity is out. And it saves them money because they can centralize their operations in a one location without the need of having IT personnel on site.

Shemaria gives an example of one customer with engineering headquarters in New York opening new sites. “Instead of flying an engineer all the way to Mexico or Argentina, they buy from us, and they can perform all the configurations from their central site.”

CLAdirect’s customers in Latin America primarily use Opengear’s Infrastructure Manager (IM) appliance which is designed for high density locations. They also buy the smaller Resilience Gateways, which are intended for smaller deployments such as branch offices and kiosks.

Opengear Plays Well with Devices from Multiple Vendors

CLAdirect’s customers appreciate being able to attach routers, switches, firewalls, UPS, and more to Opengear devices, depending on their needs. He says, “The most-used feature when you are Out-of-Band is the ability to restart a device with a remote power cycle.” For example, when you have an extremely remote site that might take days to reach, you only need to use Opengear to power cycle the PDU and you’re done.

Secure Central Management with Lighthouse

Shemaria also appreciates Lighthouse management software. It presents a single pane of glass where you can hop from console to console and get the whole picture of your network very easily. Lighthouse gives you a set of remote hands everywhere at any time, and they are always on and always working.

CLAdirect found that it was very hard to sell centralized management to customers because they had security concerns. That changed when they found out that Lighthouse has secure connections run by an IPSEC tunnel and additional security in place.  You have all your management in a single pane of glass in a secure way.

He says, “When you deploy Lighthouse Enterprise, you remotely and securely connect to all of your devices and you are able to access any of them without needing a lot of configuration. Deployment is easy, management is easy.”

Opengear’s Solid Reputation

Since CLAdirect is a solution provider, and reseller, the workflow for finding products often involves vendors approaching them directly. For example, a major router manufacturer will pitch their product and CLAdirect learns about them and how they could work for their customers.

Opengear is different. He says, “Our customers ask for Opengear.” Instead of getting a pitch from Opengear,  one of their biggest customers in the enterprise vertical were practically demanding Opengear as a solution. Now they are preaching Opengear to customers that don’t know about it.

Future Plans

Opengear is one of the top three brands that CLAdirect has pushed the most in the last year because it’s a product that’s easy to implement. Shemaria says it requires very little engineering manpower. It has a very short sales cycle because it’s easy to demonstrate the value of the product. He adds that it requires little support. Once it’s installed, it’s very resilient and it also requires very low manpower to maintain it and support it. And now that the world has changed and we are living in a remote environment, it’s even harder to send someone on site. When asked what one word came to mind when he thought of Opengear, Shemaria replied, “Trust.”