Over the past twelve months, Procera has experienced great successes in the Higher Education market across the globe. Although there are a number of contributing factors to this achievement, a few reasons have really begun to stand out in our minds as to why we have been so successful in this space.

Higher Education institutions around the world have quickly realized that their networks are a critical component in their success, ensuring that the bandwidth is managed properly and that the students have access to the resources that they need to succeed in the classroom is critical. The cost of this bandwidth can quickly spiral out of control, as students will use every bit of available bandwidth – “Just because it is there”. Since all applications do not have the same performance or latency requirements from the network, it makes sense to ensure that real-time applications (VOIP, conferencing, video, etc.) have the necessary bandwidth needed to operate effectively, and congestion on the Internet link is very common. The available bandwidth to universities has dramatically increased over the past few years, to the point where many require not just 1Gbps of network performance, but even up to 10Gbps of capacity of traffic management, and they have outgrown their existing traffic management solutions.

In the United States, there is even a mandate called the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) that instructs Higher Education institutions to take action to help control illegal file sharing. Procera has helped many higher education institutions comply with the HEOA by helping them effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials by allowing them to control the use of file sharing technologies on their network – typically a huge contributor to network congestion and bandwidth usage. It has also saved many University CIOs from receiving letters from the MPAA and RIAA about the copyright violations occurring on their network, not to mention helped pare back their overhead by reducing the number of DMCA take-down notices they received.

From our perspective, Higher Education institutions are the breeding ground for new and exciting applications. Being installed in as many of these networks as possible keeps us at the forefront of application trends, as we have seen the use of streaming video, social networking applications, and VOIP/IM applications from around the world skyrocket in these environments, and they continue to keep our signature database ahead of competitors that do not have the same exposure and responsiveness to the Higher Education customer base. We have also benefited from these customers’ deployments as they are often more sophisticated in their use of policies to control bandwidth than even some service providers, so they give PacketLogic a good workout and ensure that our solutions maintain performance and visibility under even heavy loads. We have also experienced good feedback on our implementations of IPv6, which are becoming more and more critical to research universities and international consortiums, as IPv6 has become more prevalent on Internet2 links. We strongly believe that IPv6 will become more critical to networks around the world, and are working to provide the leading IPv6-aware traffic management solution on the market.

Besides, how can you have an “Intelligent” enforcement solution without going to school every once in awhile? We learn something new every day at Procera, and it is often our education customers that teach us that lesson.