Pramod Badjate serves as President and General Manager of NETGEAR Enterprise.
In May, a school my daughter attends sent home an alarming message: Canvas, the school’s learning management system, had been hit by a cyberattack. Student names, email addresses and ID numbers were exposed. The school lost access to its platform during finals week.
I’ve been thinking about that message because it captures something I often see play out across small and mid-sized organizations. The threats facing them are the same threats facing large enterprises. The budgets, staffing and tools available to them aren’t. The networking industry, the one I work in, has done a poor job of bridging that gap.
The Accidental IT Manager
Inside most SMEs, there’s a person I’d call the accidental IT manager. They got the job because they’re good at solving problems, or because they’re the least intimidated by technology, or sometimes just because someone had to do it. They’re keeping the network up for a business that depends on being connected, and they’re doing it while juggling three other responsibilities. This person isn’t well-served by the networking market as it exists today.
The enterprise tier was built for organizations with dedicated network operations centers, full-time network engineers and professional services budgets. If an SME buys into that world, it’s buying complexity that its team can’t actually manage.
The consumer tier doesn’t fit, either. It was built for homes and small offices with modest demands. Rely on it for a real business, and you’re one peak traffic day away from a problem.
The market needs to provide something built with a fundamentally different person in mind—someone who needs the network to just work, who doesn’t have time to become an expert and who still can’t afford for security to be an afterthought.
Why The Market Got Here
The large networking vendors go where the large contracts are. That’s not a criticism; it’s rational. Fortune 500 accounts have bigger budgets, longer relationships and more predictable renewal cycles. Building products for that customer makes business sense, even if it leaves a large segment of the market underserved.
Consumer networking companies face the opposite pressure. Volume drives their economics, so simplicity wins out over capability every time. A product that covers 90% of home use cases at the right price point is a better business than one that handles the edge cases a small business actually needs.
The result is a gap. SMEs get handed a choice between tools that are too complicated and tools that aren’t good enough, and they’re told to pick their compromise. Most of them do and quietly absorb the cost in IT hours, downtime and security incidents.
The security gap is where this does the most damage. The common assumption is still that serious security infrastructure is an enterprise concern. In reality, attackers don’t discriminate by company size. A dental practice with 30 employees and patient payment data is an attractive target, as is a school district with student records and aging hardware or a regional law firm handling sensitive client files.
The standard prescription for organizations such as these is to bolt security onto their existing network—buy a firewall, add a VPN, maybe bring in an MSSP if the budget allows. This approach fails for the same reason the original network often fails: It requires expertise the team doesn’t have and creates seams between systems that are hard to monitor and easy to exploit. What actually works is security treated as a native function of the network itself, woven into how traffic is managed, segmented and monitored from the start.
What Changes When The Product Fits
I’ve seen enough examples to believe the gap is closeable. We worked with a school district in Ohio that switched to us mid-project during a post-Covid-19 supply crunch. The district was reluctant, as we had a consumer reputation, and it wasn’t sure the product belonged in a school district. It was deployed at one school, which held up, and a year later, it was deployed at nearly 20 schools.
I’ll admit I’ve grown a little tired of AI conversations. Every meeting seems to have one. However, the specific change I think is coming to network management is real.
The accidental IT manager’s biggest vulnerability is the gap between something going wrong and someone noticing. Right now, that gap depends on a person and their availability, expertise and luck in catching the right alert. A network that monitors itself, identifies degradation before it becomes an outage and can match symptoms to known resolutions can close that gap structurally.
Conversational interfaces will matter here, too. Most people managing SME networks today aren’t networking professionals. They’re generalists who shouldn’t have to navigate a complex configuration to get something done. The tooling is heading toward a direction where you can describe what you need, and the system handles it. That’s transformative for this type of customer.
The Industry Owes This Market More Attention
I spend a lot of time thinking about what it would mean to get this right and build for the accidental IT manager the way we built for the AV integrators who told us, for years, that nobody was listening to them. The SME networking market deserves a product that just fits. Not a watered-down enterprise product or a consumer product with a business label on it, but something designed from the start for organizations in which IT is a person who has many other things to do instead of a department.
The tools to do that exist. The industry just hasn’t prioritized building them. That’s the gap that I think is finally starting to close.
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