KEMP Technologies lowers the price on their LoadMaster 2000 from $2,490 to $1,590.

When it comes to load balancers, KEMP Technologies has prided themselves on providing the lowest cost solution while still providing high-end quality. In fact, KEMP is still the only company that puts the functionality of a high end balancer into the lower price points. However, other companies have been lowering their prices, so even though they don't provide as much, they are now getting their foot in the door on the budget load balancer market. With this increased pressure, KEMP decided the price gap needed to be widen.

To solve this, KEMP Technologies looked into lowering prices and then came up with a sales idea. It would involve their SMB targeting $2490 LoadMaster 2000. "In December of 2009, we wanted to offer it as a holiday special. We wanted to see what that would do to the demand of the technology; see if there were companies were $2,490 was a financial show stopper, considering most companies buy them in pairs.... we sold out 3 months worth of inventory in 2 weeks," said Peter Melerud, Kemp Technologies VP of Biz Development.

The holiday special set the price of the LoadMaster 2000 to $1590, $900 off the original price. The response was phenomenal. Apparently, an almost $2500 load balancer was a show stopper for most companies. Armed with this news, KEMP looked into whether they could maintain that level of affordability.

" We found that relative to the volume we were able to maintain affordability, supportability, deliverability; so we decided to make that price permanent once we got stabilized on inventory," remarked Peter.

Load balancers are used to remove single points of failure. Because of this, load balancers are normally deployed in tandem. Load balancers are also used as a preventative measure. As a preventative measure, many SMBs find it hard to justify tens of thousands of dollars for a pair of load balancers. With the new price point KEMP has come up with, a pair of load balancers would cost just above $3,000. Couple this with their recent virtualizing of their load master software (Virtual LoadMaster), and it would seem that KEMP has taken an aggressive stance in protecting the SMB load balancer market.

Current economic conditions have caused smaller businesses to ignore the hazards associated with website outages and loss of revenue, notes Kevin Mahon, KEMP Technologies CEO. Lowering the price on the LoadMaster 2000 reflects our commitment to help business get better use of their networks and applications with an obvious quicker return on investment. It wasnt easy, but we are able to deliver an affordable load balancer without compromising on the feature set, performance or support.