According to OneAccess CMO, Pravin Mirchandani, OneAccess can keep its nose ahead in this, the branch office router market, because of its CSP focus. That’s resulted in significant success already against Cisco in Europe with OneAccess getting the ‘staging’ and pre-configuration right, as well as ensuring that price/performance and defensible TCO (total cost of ownership) figures line up as well.

“We think we can replicate what we’ve done in Europe and attain a beach-head in the US market. We’ve purpose-designed our products to deliver what CSPs want - like hosted SIP support.”

The company also feels it can benefit from the discontinuities caused by the telcos rushing for SDN and NFV, partly to break their reliance on traditional and dominant equipment providers.

“Yes we can intercept SDN,” says Pravin. “Our whole approach is based on separation (of the media and control planes) and the support of virtualised fuhctions.” One major target for the OneAccess branch router is the MTU (multi-tenant unit) market where the CSP can go in and install a router in the basement of a mutli-tenant building and then serve multiple customers using virtual routers housed on the one platform.

OneAccess is also seeing some action from what Pravin calls the “non-telco service provider” - the smaller, probably new-entrant player with a vertical sector focus looking to marry cloud with network capabilities.

“These verticals are becoming very important,” he says.

According to researchers Infonetics, this branch router market is set to grow to $1.5 billion (from $1.25 billion) this year, much faster than the high-end market which is expected to remain flat. OneAccess’s ONE1560 and ONE2510 are priced up to about US$5,000 per unit,much cheaper than Cisco’s alternatives.