Playbook Volume 10 - ChannelVision Magazine

Eighteen months ago, for instance, SimpleWAN launched managed Wi-Fi, said Knight. “That is our number one selling product. We are an SD WAN company, but managed Wi-Fi is the lead-in for a good portion of our sales. Same goes with cybersecurity and PCI. Those lead-ins are what people are looking for.” Knight also relayed the story of a call from a single-location business owner who wanted to talk SD-WAN. “They don’t have a WAN; they have an internet connection and wanted better availability out of it.” Here SD-WAN is almost a type of amped-up internet service. “The sale becomes: put in one box to replace five boxes, and that box is a service delivery center,” said Knight. “So whatever the next thing a customer may need, it’s a service and not a rip and re- place; it’s a checked box in the system.” IT in the House Before any SD-WAN conversa- tion starts, however, Knight strongly recommends making sure IT is rep- resented on the initial call. Unlike the days of dropping off a circuit or pipe, “with SD-WAN, you are taking over instructions of the LAN, Wi-Fi, devic- es, security,” he said. “This is where IT lives. If you do not bring in the IT people on the initial call, they will fight you every step of the way.” Even if the company owner is on board, IT might see SD-WAN as a threat, warned Knight, and must be made to understand how SD-WAN ac- tually helps them. “IT people think they like complexity, but complexity is that phone call at 10 o’clock on a Friday night,” he said. Just because IT is in the room, how- ever, don’t assume prospects have a full understanding of what SD-WAN is and can be. This is a marketplace that is still very much forming and still re- quires plenty of education and evange- lizing, so salespeople who can position themselves as “the expert in the room” stand to benefit the most. “The winning partner is the educated partner,” said Knight. “This is a very consultative sale.” From tracking internet searches on SD-WAN, for example, Simple- WAN found that IT buyers are not yet searching for information on “finding an SD-WAN agent,” or “How do I buy SD-WAN?” Rather, they still predomi- nantly are typing “What is SD-WAN?” into search engines, said Knight. “It’s a marketing term. They don’t un- derstand the value of it quite yet,” he said. “There are maybe 100 SD-WAN pro- viders or more,” added Paul Crane, net- work solutions architect for CenturyLink, who also points to the added confusion of ongoing consolidation within the mar- ket. “You have to be able to say, ‘I’ve already done the research, and here are the reasons why one is better than the other or why this one might be a better fit for your organization.” “Your customers are used to buying hardware from a distributor and software from a telecom agent,” said Knight. “This is a hardware and software play; the two models merge. It is a new world in which customer are not sure who to go to, so the most educated partners who present solutions are going to get the business going forward.” And make no mistake, any SD- WAN expertise had better include an understanding of the relation between deployments and security. After all, very little happens at the network level without deep consid- eration of how it impacts security, threat detection and mitigation, and SD-WAN is no exception. Nearly nine out of 10 IT pros surveyed for Cato, for instance, said threat protection was very important (40 percent) or critical (47 percent) to the SD-WAN decision-making process. There’s good reason for the concern. In many cases, SD-WAN providers are asking customer to replace firewalls with an SD-WAN box. “If your customer is not married to their firewall, they are comfortable with that change” explained Burchett. “But if you are dealing with a customer that has spent a significant amount of time and money on a given security structure and a given security provider, that is a very tough sell.” In other words, customer-facing salespeo- ple need to be up to speed on both the security features that might be built into a box, as well as the ability for a solution to integrate with existing resources. Currently, it’s estimated that some- where between 10 and 20 percent of mid-sized to large companies have initi- ated an SD-WAN deployment. That’s probably somewhat generous, but large chunks in most surveys do have SD-WAN plans, or at least it’s on their radars. That includes the 73 percent of respondents in the Cato survey that claim to be planning or considering an SD-WAN purchase. And while the market may remain somewhat murky at this early stage, it’s pretty clear that the potential disruption of so-called transformational technolo- gies, such as VoIP and SD-WAN, should never be underestimated. “If you are not talking to your cus- tomers about SD-WAN, somebody else is,” said Crane, “and they might not be your customer for long.” o Primary Network Challenges Facing IT Organizations Bandwidth costs 42% Equipment maintenance and updates 39% Performance between locations 38% Managing the network 35% Performance in the cloud 25% Providing and managing secure mobile/remote access 23% Last-mile availability 21% Finding and retaining skilled networking personnel 19% Time to deploy new locations 17% Source: Cato Networks 34 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK