After spending much of the year expanding its customer ranks through acquisition, Cogent Communications is now increasing its service roster to include a managed security service.

The optical ISP is partnering with Tekmark Global Solutions to offer two levels of managed security without having to develop the expertise internally. Cogent will sell the service and maintain the customer relationship, while Tekmark operates the service and provides expertise for customer and sales support.

"One of the principles that Cogent was founded on was that we are extremely good at providing dedicated Internet access and we didn’t want to defocus our sales or service teams by trying to do too many other things," said David Schaeffer, Cogent’s CEO. "It’s a slippery slope. Many service providers feel they have to add value-added services because their underlying networks aren’t efficient enough to allow them to make money selling bandwidth services."

The managed security service comes in two flavors, Advanced and Premium. Advanced level customers pay $199 a month and receive a SonicWALL firewall which can support an unlimited number of user devices, as well as Virtual Private Network remote client licenses, 24x7x365 customer support and online reporting via a Web portal. For $259 a month, Premium level customers receive all of that plus content filtering and desktop anti-virus services.

The company was prompted to develop a managed security offering in large part because of Cogent’s recent acquisition of Verio’s T-1 access customers, about 2400 businesses across the country. Verio was already offering a managed security service, Schaeffer said, and Cogent will continue to support that service, in addition to its new offering.

"What really drove us to offer managed security service through a partnership was customer demand and the increase in the size of our customer base from the recently announced acquisition of Verio’s dedicated access business," Schaeffer said.

While former Verio customers have been moved onto Cogent’s network, their existing service contracts remain in effect. As those contracts come up for renewal, Schaeffer expects many former Verio customers to choose Cogent’s managed security service, so that eventually the former Verio offering might be phased out.

"We believe we will be able to pass on savings based on our more efficient network," he said. "The feature set is equal or superior to what they are receiving at lower cost."