NETGEAR Outlines Growth Strategy for Today's Smart Networking Company

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 5, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- NETGEAR®, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTGR), a global networking company that delivers innovative products to consumers, businesses and Internet service providers, today outlined its growth plan as well as announced three new product families and a range of new content offerings, support services and certifications. NETGEAR holds the #1 position in retail home networking in the U.S. and Western Europe, and its Smart IT business solutions have achieved #1 market share for unmanaged switches, smart switches and business storage, #2 for business firewalls and #3 for wireless routers and gateways in the same geographies. Today, the company also announced that it was positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a "Challenger" in the "Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management" report. NETGEAR is one of the few UTM companies that provide a solution across three primary midsize infrastructure challenges: security, data backup/protection, and switching and wireless LAN business products.

Ever increasing array of content

Today's networks must support an ever increasing array of content and communications, including email, cloud computing, data backup, ecommerce, multimedia, entertainment, remote surveillance, social media, virtualization, video conferencing and VoIP. NETGEAR helps consumers and businesses connect with networking, storage and security products that are reliable, affordable and simple for an ever-broadening range of applications and uses.

For more than 10 years, NETGEAR has been first to market with networking innovations like beam-forming and smart WiFi antennas, consumer technologies like cloud-based parental controls and Push2TV?, and business firsts such as Smart and Plus switching, stream scanning security appliances, unmanaged gigabit switching and X-RAID® network storage.

"NETGEAR is today's smart networking company," said Patrick Lo, NETGEAR Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "We're announcing a growth plan to take a leadership position in five new home and business networking areas, including TV connectivity, 100Mbps+ broadband gateways, 3G/4G wireless broadband gateways, network storage and security appliances."

NETGEAR makes high performance, dependable and easy to use home networking, storage and digital media products to connect people with the Internet and stream and share content across multiple devices in their network. Over the past year, the company has helped to define TV 2.0 and connected entertainment with a range of products that make it easy to enjoy home and Internet-based content on HDTVs and other devices.

Business customers demand reliable, affordable and user friendly solutions. In September, NETGEAR introduced a new network management software platform that provides customers with powerful centralized management across all NETGEAR IT products, including Ethernet Switching, Campus WiFi, Network Storage, and Security. Now, customers and partners can build modern solutions around cloud computing, virtualization, security, and mobility with a very user friendly platform for network management.

The recent addition of the new UTM50 to NETGEAR's ProSecure® line of security appliances strengthens the NETGEAR offering to businesses to protect against the exponential growth in the number of virus and malware threats, dangerous websites, spam emails, and hackers that threaten business environments.

Today, the company announced a number of developments to further address virtualization, cloud computing and network infrastructure needs. The NETGEAR ReadyNAS Pro Series is a family of desktop storage products designed specifically for small businesses or remote and branch offices that need business-class features at an affordable price point. In addition, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 certification is now available on NETGEAR's business storage products for Hyper-V in business environments. The company also rolled out ReadyNAS Replicate?, a cloud-based data replication solution that provides small to mid-sized businesses, plus remote and branch offices, with a simple, cost-effective way to manage data backup, restore and disaster recovery across ReadyNAS units, local or remote. Other business product announcements included four additions to the ProSafe® Plus Switch family, designed for growing businesses with growing network needs.

Customer service perspective

From a customer service perspective, NETGEAR today announced that it will provide free next business day on-site replacement service for many of its business products. This service will be launched in many markets across Europe. This service offering, in addition to NETGEAR's Lifetime warranty on ProSafe products, provides a unique benefit to all business customers.

NETGEAR supplies top Internet service providers (ISPs) with retail-proven, whole home solutions for their customers. The company has created strong demand for its ISP solutions by offering a wide range of open and flexible products with low development, maintenance and support costs, along with NETGEAR's famous reliability and performance.

Worldwide, NETGEAR delivered 41 customized home gateways and routers to 29 leading service providers in the past year, spanning DOCSIS, mobile broadband, FTTH gigabit Ethernet and VDSL, many with integrated voice capabilities. The company has introduced next generation technologies that deliver higher throughput, reliability and wireless reach as well as innovative media delivery, auto configuration and vertical services capabilities for service providers.

The company's entry last year into the mobile broadband market is now beginning to bear fruit as mobile operators upgrade their 3G networks to the highest performing 3G base stations (HSPA+ & DC-HSPA up to 42 Mbps) and introduce their 4G networks (LTE & WiMAX up to 100Mbps). This high performance wireless technology, just now becoming available for mass market deployment, enables NETGEAR to offer mobile broadband gateways with performance that rival today's wired broadband options.

To date, millions of consumers have chosen NETGEAR products to stream movies, TV and music from the Internet, share photos, play games, shop, read, email, access apps and social networks, connect to printers and network storage, and share remote access with friends and family. And more than 18 million businesses worldwide have broken free of the limitations of traditional enterprise vendors and deployed NETGEAR Smart IT networking, storage and security solutions.