By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
NETGEAR has for decades been a household name in consumer-grade Wi-Fi but the company is still not nearly as recognised for its similarly robust and high-quality enterprise products. The company is now kicking off a new strategy focused on simpler solutions designed specifically for SMEs. As part of the new strategy, VAAG Systems of Chennai, India, has been acquired by NETGEAR, the company announced last week.
NETGEAR says the time has come to leave overly complex Wi-Fi systems behind and serve SMEs – a large market segment – with Wi-Fi solutions designed specifically for them with focus on simplicity and reliability. That’s the thrust of NETGEAR for Business’ new strategy and vision headed up by President and GM Pramod Badjate, who was hired to renew and grow the business last year.
“We’ve listened to the market and the word back is nearly unanimous: Our clients are delighted with our HW reliability, performance, and support. Meanwhile, most existing Wi-Fi and fixed networking solutions for SMEs are targeted towards what I would describe as muscular IT departments, meaning large companies with plenty of IT resources. Most solutions are also overly complex with many features that SMEs never use but still have to pay for. We’re changing that now,” says Pramod Badjate.
NETGEAR for Business’ new strategy includes renewed focus on unified wired and wireless architectures now with added security, all in a simplified format. “What often happens is that MSPs and integrators build additional layers of management themselves, on top of already complex systems. This makes networking services less reliable and also more costly. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our mission is to create solutions with the right feature sets that are much more easily implemented and managed. This drives down TCO,” he says.
As part of the new strategy and to strengthen the company’s software development team, NETGEAR last week also announced they’ve acquired VAAG Systems of Chennai, India. The new SW development center in Chennai will be focused on creating next generation AI and Cloud-based platforms for business connectivity, the company says. “Our acquisition includes upwards of 40 engineers, most with a long history of working for market leading enterprise Wi-Fi vendors. And we expect to be further expanding our Chennai staff soon,” Pramod Badjate says.
NETGEAR is already a market leader in AV-over-IP technology and is currently heading up an ecosystem of 400 AV industry partners, the company says. NETGEAR was one of the first vendors to recognise the existence of an underserved market for pre-configured plug-and-play audio and video networking solutions, including design services and education.
Further expansion into commercial, broadcast, and residential AV networking is also a business-critical component of NETGEAR for Business’ new strategy. Integrated AV-over-IP networking represents a huge cost savings over traditional solutions particularly because AV-over-IP deployments involve a lot less labour and are less prone to human error, hence also more reliable, the company says.
Meanwhile, on the financial side NETGEAR for Business has done comparatively well when taking into account relatively challenging market conditions. The company reports more than 15% revenue growth during the last quarter and is forecasting double-digit growth for 2025.
/Claus.
