We did a lot of analysis in the second half of 2015. We evaluated different technologies and we ended up using A10. We went with it based on the price-performance. We had four systems on the shortlist. We physically tested two of those providers and, at the end of the day, the two came out pretty even from a functionality and performance perspective. But the total cost of ownership of the A10 solution was superior to the other vendor, so we decided to go with A10.

One of the four providers did not want to support a proof of concept test, so we dropped that one right away. We dropped another one after looking at functional specifications which, at the time, were not as good as A10 and the other vendor. We were left with the two that we tested. At the end of the day, the total cost of ownership made the difference.

We also looked at Radware and Fortinet.

Radware had good reporting. A10 does not have good reporting.

A10 had a good B2B code and the TPS box has good capacity. The key thing for us was the direct access to engineering. However, A10 is more complex then the other solutions. You have to spend time with it to become efficient at using it. You cannot just buy it and get started on it.

We use Juniper a lot. Their support would take months to fix the same issue that A10's engineering tech support team can fix in a couple of weeks.

We looked at products such as Radware and another product but I don't remember the name of it. Ultimately, based on some information and data from other gaming companies that we spoke with, it was suggested that we look at A10.

It's so long since we actually looked at Radware, but Radware was being used by our cloud provider for their DDoS mitigation. One of the things that we looked at was that their capacity per box was much lower. At the time, those boxes only were able to handle about 10-Gigs of traffic each, which was way below our needs, especially since we were moving to a multi-hundred-Gig solution.

In the past, we've used other cloud-based solutions.

We did a proof of concept and had a bake-off between Arbor and A10 and Kentik. Because of the reports that we wanted and how we wanted to handle things, the third-party and the A10 solution were technically the best, and scalable.

The flexibility of solutions was important to us. We have the ability to either go inline, to connect directly to the TPS, or to bring it through the third-party. That in itself was a major selling point because we're not stuck with one solution. If we decide that we want to change third-party vendors, we're not married to it. We can shop around and if there's something better that comes out, we can still interface the TPS system with that new software. It meant we weren't just saddled to one vendor for a DDoS solution.