Clint McDonald is a stickler for the truth and for a precise description of the details. So it’s no small irony his work title does not describe what he does. As the Data Product Manager for Richmond, Va.-based CLEC Cavalier Telephone (www.cavtel.com), McDonald plants a foot firmly in both the sales and IT worlds. He’s a business development guy with geek street cred–in marketing but with real tech savvy.

Cavalier covers the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and southeast regions and serves six of the top 20 markets in the country. The company possesses 531 end-office collocations attached to a $1 billion fiber optic network.

In 2005, McDonald says Cavalier wanted to expand into the green fields of security as well as keep its small-to-medium- sized business (SMB) client data more secure. Cavalier’s roughly 150 SMBs, each with 10 to 25 employees, needed better protection.

“We didn’t want viruses, hackers, zombies, malware, and spam all bouncing around the network and clogging it up,” says McDonald. “We also didn’t want to leave our customers on their own to defend themselves in this kind of environment.” So the company began hunting around for a software-as-aservice (SaaS) solution. McDonald had in mind that Cavalier needed a ready-made SaaS that was managed and monitored. Cavalier wanted to cut down on customer churn and address the growing need for a comprehensive layered defense against new IT security threats.

An “off-the-shelf” product would also allow Cavalier to focus on its core competencies of collocation, telephony, fiber provisioning, and data transport.

“It was completely outside our comfort zone,” he says. “We needed out-of-house capabilities.”

A previous Cavalier product manager picked three companies for evaluation. Cavalier engaged in an exhaustive, 10-person paneled peer review of the competing bids.

“The main thing was that we wanted true-blue managed services,” says McDonald. “We stepped back and asked ourselves, ‘What is it we find we liked about each of these three companies?’”

McDonald says that after evaluating several solutions that they found to be too expensive or overly complicated, the panel eventually decided on Milford, Conn.-based Perimeter eSecurity (www.perimeterusa.com). McDonald says Perimeter was chosen because it offered the only SaaS that was a truly managed service.

McDonald visited Perimeter’s Raleigh, N.C., office to meet face to face with Perimeter programmers. “We had an all-day discovery phase of how to put this thing together. We spent all day brainstorming,” says McDonald.

Perimeter rapidly configured a Fortinet FortiGate-60 solution for Cavalier. The product offers unified threat management (UTM), incorporating services such as traffic policy control, intrusion prevention, Web content filtering, and e-mail audiovisual scanning.

After that, Cavalier brought the hardware and software back to its offices and set up testing on an eight-foot folding table. “This was not a beginning product at a Baby Bell lab, where a whole team tests equipment in a lab over and over again,” says McDonald. “At a CLEC, we simply don’t have that kind of infrastructure.”

Members of Cavalier’s network engineering group were pulled off the backbone to come up with the best method of delivering the process.

Meanwhile, McDonald set about training his sales team. The human engineering turned out to be more challenging than configuring the machines. The salespeople had a huge learning curve, while McDonald felt that there was no such thing as going “too deep” into the technical details.

“Filling out the paperwork correctly during the discovery phase was a huge learning curve,” says McDonald. “It was necessary so we could deploy security services correctly to our customers. This easily took our salespeople six to eight weeks of in-house training.”

He also needed to teach the sales team how the security offerings worked.

The plan was for Cavalier to white-label Perimeter’s services under the brand name of SecureIP. UTM combines traditional firewall monitoring services with a centralized management platform. This allows Cavalier’s SMB customers to continuously monitor Internet activity, security alarms, and other events on a Cavalier-packaged Internet portal.

“Our sales goal is to sell this security product as an a la carte feature,” says McDonald. “It is an application differentiator that will help us stand out from the crowd. Our initial goals are customer retention and to just make margin on the project,” adding that he expected the products’ sales to increase over several quarters. V

Greg Tally can be reached at gtally@vonmag.com.