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THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK
traffic, in order to free up MPLS for
video and voice.
“SD-WAN is seen as an MPLS re-
placement product, but the concern is
that it sends traffic over the best avail-
able connection,” said John Cunning-
ham, founder and co-CEO at BCM One.
“If there’s latency on all the connections,
you end up with a not-great experience.
If the broadband connections aren’t up
to the task, SD-WAN can’t help with
that. So a hybrid approach where some
applications are still on MPLS makes
sense for a lot of companies.”
Having a hybrid option is also nec-
essary if customers have contracts
with varying termination dates, requir-
ing integrated MPLS and SD-WAN
support. “You have to be looking to
make sure the network has proper rout-
ing support and devices that interoperate
with both,” said Baker.
SD-WAN also brings everything un-
der one roof from a management per-
spective – the SD-WAN itself along with
any cloud applications can be managed
from one point.
“Moving into the software-defined
realm makes provisioning easier and
also easier to support and do everything
we need to do through the lifecycle,”
Loon said. “We can pretty much do ev-
erything remotely except plug cables in,
and customers like that.”
SD-WAN sales aren’t automatic,
however. Loon explained that getting
decision makers to make the jump
from dedicated circuits to running
things over public broadband can be a
bit of a challenge.
“It’s not fully understood by your
average network manager or IT person,
so everyone wants a referral for their
exact use case,” he
said. “This is very simi-
lar to the early days
of VoIP – people were
worried about quality.
But eventually every-
one got the idea.”
There’s also market
confusion about what
SD-WAN actually offers.
“Any time you have
a disruptive tech, there’s
a certain degree of end
user and partner educa-
tion, and with this, ev-
erything around orches-
tration seems to mean different things to
different people,” Suitor said. “You can say,
here’s how to get the most utilization I can
out of the links, and you can optimize the
performance on the up and downlink; you
can have voice and video guarantees; you
can do this at distances because there
are offices spread out; it integrates
with legacy MPLS; and you can do all
of this with much simpler provisioning,
supporting multicast over a funda-
mentally unicast environment like
the Internet. Oh and it’s secure. It all
sounds great, but from a marketing
perspective, it’s a huge challenge to
explain how that works in practice.”
With all of the excitement
over SD-WAN, one caveat is to
be aware that the market is in its
heady early days, and that consoli-
dation will be inevitable.
“Not one company we speak to
isn’t interested in it, and it’s a great
conversation for channel partners to
have in order to be relevant in the WAN
spaces,” Cunningham said. “But chan-
nel partners should understand that the
market is going to change.
“Gartner said there are now about
40+ companies offering SD-WAN. Re-
member when the automobile came
along, there was a time when there were
a hundred car companies,” continued
Cunningham. “We ended up with just
three. That doesn’t mean the other 97
didn’t have good cars.”
Rather, “the market can’t support
all of these companies indefinitely, so
that’s something that CPs should be
aware of,” he said.
That caveat can also be an opportunity.
“Any channel partner with a multi-site cus-
tomer base should get in now,” Baker said.
“And you should go after every big chain
in your market. There’s a lot of money to
make, and there’s no one established as a
dominant player in this yet, so treat it as a
land grab and get as much as you can.”
o
Source: IHS Markit
Source: Samsung; Channelnomics
Which area of mobile security
do you think you are
lacking in?
What are your organization’s top challeges
in network/WAN management at branch
office locations? (Select all that apply)
Sourc : F rester, survey of U.S. network/telecom decision makers
Do you currently have multiple connections to your
branch offices?
Source: IDG Connect, Silver Peak survey of 160 mid-market & enterprise companies
13.3%
20.0%
13.3%
33.3%
Maintaining security across
public and private connections
Managing cost of increased
bandwidth requirem nts
Ensuring performance of
business-critical applications
Delivering reliable and/o
highly available connectivity
Deploying new applications
and services cost efficiently
55%
50%
49%
46%
40%
What kinds of features or capabilities are
y u int rested in to help manage your WAN?
(Percentage rated “very int rested”)
Source: Forrester, survey of U.S. network/telecom decision makers
Centrally monitor WAN links,
dependencies, anomalies
Manage traffic between
different link types
Remotely provision/configure
branch office networks
Ability to deploy WAN services
on commodity computing
Latency mitigation and
application acceleration
Deduplication/caching data to
optimize bandwidth utilization
56%
51%
47%
45%
43%
42%
No 8%
Yes, MPLS
and Broadband
38%
Yes, MPLS
and LTE
25%
Yes, Dual
Internet
14%
Yes, Dual
MPLS Links
15%
$60
$50
$40
$30
$20
$10
$0
2015 2016 2017
1G 2.5G 10G
US$ Billions
Softwar offerings
Hardware offerings
Services
Vendor relationships
Knowledge
20.0%
Source: IHS Markit
Global hosted hosted VoIP and UC seats
will pass the 70 million mark in 2020
$2,000
$4,000
$6,000
$8,000
$10,000
$12,000
$14,000
$0
Revenue
Seats
Global Revenue (US$ Millions)
2015
2020
What kinds of features or capabilities are
you interested in to help manage your WAN?
(Percentage rated “very interested”)
Source: Forrester, survey of U.S. network/telecom decision makers
Centrally monitor WAN links,
dependencies, anomalies
Manage traffic between
different link types
Remotely provision/configure
branch office networks
Ability to deploy WAN services
on commodity computing
Latency mitigation and
application acceleration
Deduplication/caching data to
optimize bandwidth utilization
SaaS
Applications
14%
Remote
Replication
13%
None
9%
Voice
8%
Other
9%
Proprietary
Data Center
Application
14%
Workforce
Collaboration
9%
IaaS
9%
Guest
Wi-fi
8%
56%
51%
47%
45%
43%
42%
Is there one application you wish you could run over
the Internet that you are not today?
Source: IDG Connect, Silver Peak survey of 160 mid-market & enterprise companies
Source: I
Globa
will p
$2,00
$4,00
$6,00
$8,00
$10,00
$12,00
$14,00
$
Global Revenue (US$ Millions)
branch offices?
Source: IDG Connect, Silver Peak survey of 160 mid-market & enterprise companies
)
aS
What kinds of features or capabilities are
you interested in to help manage your WAN?
(Percentage rated “very interested”)
Source: Forrester, survey of U.S. n twork/telecom decision makers
Centrally monitor WAN links,
dep ndencie , nomalies
Manage traffic between
different link types
Remotely provision/configure
branch office networks
Ability to deploy WAN services
on commodity computing
Latency mitigation and
application acceleration
Deduplication/caching data to
optimize bandwidth utilization
SaaS
Applications
14%
Remote
Replication
13%
None
9%
Voice
8%
Other
9%
Proprietary
Data Center
Application
14%
Workforce
Collaboration
9%
IaaS
9%
Guest
Wi-fi
8%
56%
51%
47%
45%
43%
42%
No 8%
Yes, MPLS
and Broadband
38%
Yes, MPLS
and LTE
25%
Yes, Dual
Internet
14%
Yes, Dual
MPLS Links
15%
Is there one application you wish you could run over
the Internet that you are not today?
Source: IDG Connect, Silver Peak survey of 160 mid-market & enterprise companies
Global Revenue (US$ Millions)