AccessMyLan from Asavie provides ISPs a hosted option. If you don't have a VPN service to offer your business customers, this might be a good option for you.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 23, 2009]

Dublin, Ireland-based Asavie has released its core product, AccessMyLan to service providers as a hosted service. The idea is to deliver LAN access to small businesses at a fraction of the cost of a hardware-based solution.

It's the company's core innovation, says Maurice McMullin, vice president of product management and co-founder. "It's easy to add VPNs over the website," he says. "Within minutes, customers can have more remote clients connecting securely. There's no CPE, no lead time, no interaction with sales or technical staff—it's a self-deployed solution."

Asavie was founded in 2004. "We saw how complex VPN was to deliver, and realized we could solve all of that," says McMullin.

Originally, the company expected integrators to be a core market, but this product disrupts their business.

So the key customers, now, are enterprises of all sizes and business-focused ISPs. Asavie developed the ability to integrate with key ISP billing systems. The company also incorporated cellular networks and MPLS access.

ISPs get a revenue share that rises with the volume of their business.

Customers
The product is targeted at small businesses that have several remote workers or road warriors but insufficient technical or security staff to build a remote access solution. The product integrates with smart phones such as the blackberry, iPhone, or Windows Mobile device. The solution can use the bandwidth of a cellular carrier, but it can take advantage of any internet connection as well.

Business users, McMullin says, want more than e-mail. They want full LAN access. They want their calendar, collaboration software, and other applications that are available when they're in the office.

Business managers, McMullin says, like the software because they want to control the use of remote devices. AccessMyLan enables network administrators to pass all internet traffic through a local proxy, allowing the administrator to apply business rules for content filtering, traffic management, security, and compliance.

The ISP
Large ISPs get a custom portal, and very large ISPs can host the solution on their own network. One massive ISP customer is France's ILEC, France Telecom.

Smaller ISPs, such as ISP-Planet readers, get a co-branded portal (XYZ internet powered by AccessMyLan). Asavie handles the billing, delivering data to ISPs in an open format such as XML.

Pricing and availability
The service and support that integrators charge heavily for is replaced with a flat rate monthly fee, with pricing stated clearly on the AccessMyLan website.

Pricing is per user per month plus a price per "agent". The agent mentioned here is a software agent, and most customers will want at least two, for failover, just as many small businesses have a backup arrangement for bandwidth.

McMullin says the company works with ISPs that have as few as 1,000 small business customers, but the sweet spot is closer to 40,000 DSL lines. "ISPs can contact us and we will be more than happy to set them up," he says.

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