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opportunity or to move away from selling
boxes,” Suitor said.
Target verticals include retail, fi-
nancial and insurance, and hospitality
– segments where companies tend to
have many small sites, including in fairly
rural markets where it’s possible to get
broadband 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 environ-
ment 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 communica-
tions 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
performance-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 savings
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, imple-
menting SD-WAN can go a long way to
fix quality issues because of the per-
formance 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
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
January - February, 2017
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Channel
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