Small to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) depend on IT, but they are not over-keen on spending money on new systems. Even so, vendors love SMEs because there are such a lot of them – 73,000 in the UK alone.
SMEs tend not to have full-time IT managers, so they buy unmanaged network kit, with fixed factory settings. They don't have time to understand an operating system with a command-line interface like Cisco's IOS.
So two years ago, vendors created something to tempt them a little way up-market: a switch where some features can be managed, but through a browser. These so-called smart switches are one of the fastest growing segments of the networking market.
Netgear started the trend, and other vendors like Linksys, 3Com and D-Link have jumped on board. A 24-port switch with two Gigabit uplinks, like Netgear's FS726T, can cost £100 + VAT – a price that would have seemed unbelievable three years ago.
With prices tumbling though, the only one way for vendors to persuade firms to spend more money is to tempt them with more sophisticated products. Variations on the basic smart switch model now have more Gigabit ports, or Power over Ethernet (PoE), and there are even stackable versions.
Some switches have SNMP support and 802.1x port-level authentication. Any firm big enough to need a lot of ports really needs to think about getting port-level authentication to stop strangers plugging into vacant wall jacks.
So, will smart switches eventually get all the advanced features and turn into chassis switches? Not unless SMEs actually want that to happen, say vendors, and that is the big question.
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