Friday, June 20, 2008

Bradford Networks to expand office to Mass.

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

In a growing market and with a new round of funding in the bank, Concord, N.H.-based Bradford Networks Inc. is looking to expand into Massachusetts.

The maker of network access control appliances will use part of the $8 million in funding it landed two weeks ago to open a new office along the Route 128 corridor, according to officials, though a site has not been chosen. The new office will include sales, marketing and development teams, and will look to draw on talent from the area.

“People want to work near where they live,” said Jerry Skurla, Bradford’s vice president of marketing. “This will let us, as a company, draw from talent in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts.”

While founded in 1999 as a software development firm, Bradford shifted to a product-based model and landed its first customer in 2002. In 2006, when founder and CEO Mike Gadoury began looking for private funding, the firm was home to 25 employees. Today, the company boasts 60 employees, and executives expect to expand that to 100 over the next 12 months. Executives would not, however, disclose revenue numbers.

In its early days, Bradford focused on building network access control (NAC) devices for campus networks such as boarding schools and universities. While it succeeded in carving a niche in the area, John Bullock, a managing partner at investor Windspeed Ventures in Lexington, said the company needed capital to take it to the next level and begin attacking new markets, including the enterprise.

“(Three years ago) they were one of the best companies that no one had really heard of,” he said. “But they were kind of stagnant where they needed some capital to take it to the next level.”

Since taking in their first round of $2 million in 2006, Bradford has expanded into the enterprise market, bringing its NAC appliance to customers outside of higher education, including Overstock.com, Bosch, the State of Rhode Island and fellow Granite State company PC Connection.

According to Gadoury and Bradford’s other four founders — all former executives of Cabletron Systems Inc. and one of its spin outs, Aprisma Management Technologies Inc. — the company has hit the enterprise market at the right time.

“We have really seen an increase in acceptance of NAC products in areas like financial services, hospitals and the hospitality industry,” said Gadoury.

Network access control allows network operators to manage access policies within a network on a per-device basis. Think of a firewall for controlling access from inside a network, said Skurla.

According to a recent report from The 451 Group, 2008 is expected to be a year of mass adoption for NAC technology. But the report said the space has some hefty players, including Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc., as well as a number of startups, including Bedford-based NetClarity Inc.

In another report published last year, Framingham-based IDC projected the NAC market could reach $3.2 billion in 2010, up from just $526 million in 2005.