Founder and CEO of Silver Peak

When SD-WAN first began capturing the media spotlight in 2015, many carriers initially viewed SD-WAN as a potential threat to their business.

Fast forward two years and SD-WAN now provide a new way for service providers to address the changing connectivity needs of the enterprise. As enterprise applications migrate to the cloud, a new set of opportunities has emerged for advanced managed service offerings.

RECOGNIZING SD-WAN’S MANY BENEFITS

While some of the initial messaging around SD-WAN focused on the potential cost savings of using broadband connectivity, there are more important drivers for SD-WAN that include:

• Higher availability and better application consistency by combining multiple access technologies with packet-based bonding

• More flexible and granular internet breakout policies

• Improved security via edge-to-edge micro-segmentation of traffic

Most importantly, SD-WAN provides enterprises with opportunities to rethink branches and displace decades-old multiservice branch-router architectures with a simple, cloud-first SD-WAN edge or universal CPE.

ENABLING SERVICE PROVIDERS TO LEVERAGE SD-WAN

Enterprise IT organizations are continually evaluating what IT initiatives to in-source or out-source, and WAN services are no exception. For every enterprise IT organization that implements its own SD-WAN overlay (and we’ve seen more than 500 do that with Unity EdgeConnect since launch), there are other enterprises that prefer to implement a turn-key managed SD-WAN service. They’ve been asking service providers to deliver comprehensive managed SD-WAN services.To enable service providers to leverage Silver Peak technology in managed service offerings, we’ve complemented our EdgeConnect solution with many service provider specific capabilities like web-scale multi-tenant management with Unity OrchestratorSP and comprehensive MPLS-VPN, and BGP routing interoperability. We’re continuing to work with our service provider partners to deliver the features they need to build compelling managed WAN services.

We have announced the latest in a series of service provider partnerships, this time with China Telecom. Through a new global partnership, China Telecom will deliver fully-managed SD-WAN services based on EdgeConnect and Unity Boost to its multinational enterprise clients. The new managed SD-WAN services enable China Telecom to cost effectively address the international connectivity, performance and security requirements for multinational enterprises based in the PRC seeking to expand out of region. And it will enable China Telecom to attract new multinational clients seeking to expand into and across the PRC.

At Silver Peak, we’re really excited to be on the forefront of a fresh wave of WAN innovation. We’re excited by the productivity and agility we can deliver to enterprises, whether they choose to implement their own SD-WAN with EdgeConnect or elect to go with a turn-key fully managed SD-WAN service from one of our growing list of service provider partners.