President's Letter: September 2009

If you read the article about the NetGuardian DX G4, you know that we have announced the end of life of the NetGuardian DX G2. At face value, we wanted to give everybody an opportunity for a life time buy. In reality, this is largely a non-issue in that most of our clients have already transitioned to the G4 because of the advantages inherent with the newer version.

While most consumer equipment manufactures force you to change models every year, because of our industrial and telecommunications market place, we keep our lines active considerably longer. So why do we discontinue products at all? Several reasons: Parts availability, technology of the device becomes too outdated compared to contemporary DPS gear, and changes occurring at DPS.

One key change happening at DPS, which will cause a handful of these end of life notices is that we are closing down our legacy through-hole technology line. As with the DX, most products will transition to their enhanced SMT successor. However, for some of our lower volume older products there might not be a form, fit and function equivalent new unit. The plan in those cases would be to transition to the next closest matching DPS product. In reality, by definition, the low volume aspect means these changes will have little impact on the majority of our client base, as all high volume lines have already been transitioned.

Until next time,