Elfiq Announces SMB Financing Program for Link Balancers

Bandwidth management company Elfiq Networks will announce a financing program on March 24 for its Link Balancer product line, aimed at small and midsize businesses. The plan will offer terms of 24, 30 or 36 months for the financing of the equipment, maintenance plan and installation services with no money down, the company said.

"We have decided to help our customers who are stuck between a rock and a hard place," said Elfiq Vice President of Business Development JP Hebert. "[SMBs] need bandwidth because having no access to the Internet can prove crippling, but at the same time, people have been caught off guard [by] the financial crisis."

Hebert said with this program businesses seeking to ensure connectivity for applications, employees and customers can implement technology they need with models such as Elfiq's LB-550E or LB-1100E link balancers, which the company said are suited for environments where budgets are sensitive and downtime can cause financial losses.

The LB-550E enables the use of two ISP links with a total of 30M bps of throughput and the LB-1100E enables four with a total of 60M bps, which the company said meets the needs of most midmarket companies. The products come with features such as the use of multiple concurrent ISPs, LAN Failsafe, traffic segmentation and QOS (quality of service), and inbound and outbound traffic balancing.

"With this new program, organizations can acquire a key component for their network infrastructure at very affordable prices, without spending their budget dollars all at once," Hebert said. "Combining an Elfiq Link Balancer with one or more low-cost ISP links such as DSL and cable modem will provide increased throughput [and] raise uptime and productivity at a monthly rate less than the monthly price of a T1 circuit in many cases."

Hebert said the financial incentive has always been part of the company's game plan, but until now has not been pushed aggressively. "Now we're starting to see some interest," he said. "All sorts of small businesses-financial, legal, accounting-can all benefit from our products. And in this credit crunch, we've decided to offer credit."