Photo & story by Stephanie Tumampos
TAIPEI, Taiwan—Communications equipment provider DrayTek Corp. announced recently it rolled out network management and centralization tools targeting small and medium indoor offices in the Philippines.
With their wide range of routers that cater from DSL to 4G and LTE services, their products have displayed a strong market in Europe, where 70 percent of their sales go, and the rest to Asia, Australia and Middle East.
“Our market caters to office-based solutions,” says Daniel Ni, senior manager marketing department of DrayTek. With their single WAN that can connect 30 people to their midsize network that links 100-500 hosts, DrayTek comes in the market with multiple choices of the Vigor model series that ranges from routing, VoIP, VPN (virtual private network), WAN (wide area network), LAN (local area network) and WLAN (wireless local area network) connectivity.
The competitiveness of the company comes from their own fabricated software system that protects their customers from various data breach. “Our firewall security is the core of the company,” Alice Huang, regional Manager and international sales of DrayTek, said in an interview at their head office and manufacturing site in Hsinchu, Taiwan. “Our firewall is strong and built-in for free when you purchase our products and no need for license.”
The routers that DrayTek offers also provide function and control behavior of how people surf the Internet. “If you need 30 people to surf the Internet smoothly, they would need routers that provide session control like ours,” Huang told the BusinessMirror. She added, “Some people download through P2P [peer-to-peer] and some occupy the bandwidth, these routers can regulate the use.”
DrayTek entered the Philippine market through Arrowtek Corp. as local distributor last January. Although they have had past orders from some Philippine companies directly to their office, DrayTek wants to formally enter the market.
Huang emphasized that since the market is new for the company, they aim to at least sell 1,000 units of their routers this year.
They also have several projects already and talked about a possible product launch soon. “One company client would like to use our routers in their branch offices,” Huang said declining to name the company as negotiations are ongoing.
She said the company needed VPN connections back to their headquarters and would like to use DrayTek ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) routers. There are only 2 or 3 people in the branch office and cannot control all these connections so they centralized their system using DrayTek’s management tool and to match these routers outside, Huang explained.
“They don’t have to hire or send their MIS (management information system) administrator to configure their routers.”
DrayTek was initially known in Europe because they had the first terminal adaptor for the Macintosh, the Vigor128 which was an integrated services digital network (ISDN)-based solution. They were also known in the United Kingdom as a low cost router that was the only device compatible with the British Telecom’s USB-model based ADSL service.
All of their products have IPv6 support and their wireless LAN management system allows centralization of compatible devices, Huang said. The company also develops its own operating system, she added. Some of DrayTek’s newest routers also feature an LTE-ready SIM card.
Huang said the company has a global demand of 30,000 units per month.
They are also looking into future connectivity options such as the 5G. “We are watching but, sometimes it is too early for us,” Ni said in a separate interview. “We have to wait until the market is mature. We will have the solution coming from our research and we can try our software engineering to carry out on the hardware.”