Hydra's team has a depth and breadth of technical knowledge and experience. Our people have seen most examples of most problems on most types of network equipment. We've been there, seen it, done it and bought the T shirt.

Reasons for going outside include not having the requirement to actively manage the process, not needing to dedicate significant in-house resources, or to continually invest in the latest technology. Hydra already does all of these things, so why re-invent the wheel when you can easily and cost effectively use our resources.

The laws, as you would expect, are not particularly clear as the precedents are not yet well established. However, we have all heard reports of employees costing their companies large sums of cash by abusing internet access facilities. Abuse can take many forms, from the employee using company facilities to look for a new job, through to incurring huge gambling losses which are charged to the employer's phone account, or downloading offensive images, which can lead to lawsuits from offended employees, or even criminal prosecution.

Hydra can help reduce or eliminate these risks, by implementing a content filtering solution. This prevents access to undesirable sites, thus reducing the risk of loss and unproductive employee time.

Hydra provides tailored solutions to your specific network and internet access issues. We are not a box shifter.

We believe that our quality of service and commitment to our customers is second to none. As a small (but beautifully formed) business, which is owned by the people who work in it, our success depends on our performance. So we think nothing of going to Holland to personally collect a piece of equipment, when we have been told that it is not possible to obtain it for weeks.

We are truly independent. We are not afraid to go against the grain, where others might hesitate if relationships with large manufacturers are concerned. People who work for Hydra have three things in common- intelligence, excellence and sheer hard work. We do not compromise those qualities.

The main reason that we have such a great customer list however, is that we generate confidence. People who deal with Hydra know that the job will be done on time, on budget, that the solution will work, and that we will also have a good time along the way. Most of our customers have become friends, who enjoy our company socially as well as professionally. How many businesses can say that?

Caching will only improve quality of performance if it is intelligently implemented. Hydra has identified the best available products and has designed solutions which make web sites faster, smarter, and more reliable, while using less bandwidth. The tangible benefits for ecommerce are there for all to see. If more users can access your site more quickly, and you are able to prioritise those users, then you must increase your sales potential. Also, by taking traffic away from the slower and less resilient areas of the firewall and servers, the risk of expensive down time is greatly reduced. Lastly, our solutions remove the need to resort to the old standard response to web performance issues- buying more expensive bandwidth.

Hydra customers who have implemented our CacheFlow solution, together with the web content aware ArrowPoint switch, report major improvements in performance. QXL.com for example, reported that more than 50% of the traffic was diverted away from the servers to the cache.