Competition for Internap's FCP product.

[Drew Weaver <drew.weaver () thenap com>]

Hi,

As my Avaya CNA/Route Science box begins to seriously age, and without the support of Avaya for 'Service Provider' uses 
of the product, I have been looking for alternatives to the product.

The value we get from this product is mainly in the ability to easily manage our bandwidth commitments in a hands off 
way without having to manually manipulate anything. I have no real illusions that the 'performance' side of things is 
'arguable' at best with these sorts of products due to the nature of the Internet.

Internap to me stands out as essentially the only alternative to this product, but they have been tremendously 
difficult to work with, they won't allow us to demo a unit to see if it offers the same functionality as our current 
solution. The reason they won't allow us to a demo a unit is because they 'don't stock them'. So basically they have 0 
units until someone orders one, that is fine if that is their policy but that hasn't really been our experience with 
other hardware vendors that want close to 100K for a piece of niche equipment. 

My questions are:

-What are other people doing who currently use or used the Avaya/RS product in the past?
-Does anyone know of any competition in this space (aside from hiring a guy that sits there and does this for us 
manually)?
-Has Cisco's OER/PFR made any progress in the last few years (is anyone using it?)

Sorry to disturb,

-Drew