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Target verticals include retail, finan-
cial and insurance, and hospitality – seg-
ments where companies tend to have
many small sites, including in fairly rural
markets where it’s possible to get broad-
band inexpensively.
“Take a money mart type company
with storefronts across the country,”
Suitor said. “If they had MPLS, you pay
through the nose. They don’t all have the
same datacomm environment either. It’s
so much easier to build a standing SD-
WAN that they can just link into. Channel
partners that previously sold hardware
can now provide managed services on
the back of our network.”
Most of the channel sales fall into
two categories – MPLS replacement
and the ability to address issues with
hosted PBX, VoIP or unified communi-
cations installations.
“All the providers have a differ-
ent version of the MPLS replacement
story to tell,” said Brent Baker, network
services manager at Powernet. “Cloud-
based services are driving the need for
bandwidth through the roof, but it’s not
practical for most businesses to put in
50Mpbs connections everywhere. SD-
WAN allows them to make use of per-
formance-based routing with low cost
broadband to achieve the same con-
nectivity goals at very close to the same
quality as MPLS, and it creates a finan-
cial incentive that they can’t ignore.”
Baker said that moving to SD-WAN
can save a customer with 12 locations
$12,000 to $20,000 every month.
“It doesn’t matter if people think SD-
WAN is a good idea or not; those sav-
ings are impossible to ignore,” he said.
The second scenario makes use of
forward error correction. “For people that
already have broadband but are having
problems with hosted PBX, implement-
ing SD-WAN can go a long way to fix
quality issues because of the perfor-
mance routing,” Baker explained. “It
makes everything run better.”
Anton Loon, vice president of sales
at Powernet, added, “People with hosted
VoIP and real-time apps see the value
in this. Some of our agents won’t sell
hosted anymore unless the customer
goes with SD-WAN as well. This gets rid
of organizational headaches and saves
people’s organizational time.”
The obvious sweet spot for SD-WAN
is multi-location businesses with multiple
applications running on the network. But
another market approach is for business-
es to use SD-WAN for secure best-efforts
Mid-Market, Enterprise Timeframe
for SD-WAN Implementation
Already deployed
27%
Within six months
44%
Within 12 months
21%
Within 24 months
6%
No plans
2%
Source: IDG Connect, Silver Peak survey of 160 companies
11
THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK