Jul/Aug 19 - ChannelVision Magazine

Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Gerald Baldino Contributing Editor gerald@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Associate Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 David Garcia Digital Marketing Manager david@bekabusinessmedia.com Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Neil Ende General Counsel Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Fax: 480.503.0990 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2019 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. ChannelVision and the ChannelVision logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media Even the surliest of technology curmudgeons must admit, SD-WAN so far has lived up to the buzz of the past few years. Even if not in terms of being an evolutionary sea change for networking, at least it has been in terms of adoption and revenues. Already, SD-WAN contributes as much as a third of channel sellers’ WAN service revenues, according to a Heavy Reading survey (see Where SD-WAN Stands , page 32), while an IDG survey for Masergy found that 54 percent of large organizations (500 employees or more) have adopted SD-WAN, with another 36 percent actively researching it. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, the percent of enterprises considering alternative approaches to MPLS jumped from 23 percent to 41 percent, according to Nemertes Research.  Compare these rates to the adoption of a parallel transformational-type technology familiar to the channel community: VoIP. Born in the mid-1990s, voice over IP hit the market hard in the early 2000s, and by 2004, all the major carriers (and some MSOs) offered a VoIP product. Yet by 2011, less than 10 percent of wired business voice lines were VoIP lines, according to FCC counts. While the technology behind SD-WAN, for its part, can be traced back to the 1970s, and one could argue SD-WAN became a reality when WAN optimization emerged in the mid-2000s, the first SD-WAN-type products were introduced less than 10 years ago. The term “SD-WAN” itself, didn’t catch on with product marketers until as recently as 2014. To some degree, however, the difference in early adoption between VoIP and SD-WAN can be attributed to timing. When VoIP was first pitched to organizations, voice network managers, quite simply, weren’t in dire need of something new. There were no mobile-enabled workforces, no messaging applications, no talk of online collaboration and no perceived need yet for unified communications pushing for change. Call quality on the legacy networks was adequate at “five-9s,” while VoIP suffered from inadequate bandwidth. WAN managers, on the other hand, are currently dealing with a literal (digital) transformation of their companies and their networks, and the new and emerging ways their networks are being used. On a day-to-day basis, they face the challenges of cloud migration; morphing security threats; increasing costs; bandwidth prioritization and application performance issues; a skills gap; and an expanding number of users, devices and locations. Today, the flexibility and agility of a WAN is a competitive advantage. SD-WAN is well suited to address such challenges. In the early days of VoIP, service provider marketing departments had little more to lean on besides “same functions for less money.” With SD-WAN today, “it can be cheaper than MPLS” is but one arrow in the quiver. Perhaps that’s why analyst types expect SD-WAN revenues to grow at annual rates during the next few years of 50 to 60 percent, with the market reaching as high as $6 billion by next year. And perhaps that’s why such expert predictions might actually, and uncharacter- istically, come true. SD-WAN Hits the Hype LETTER 6 Channel Vision | July - August, 2019