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14
THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK
By
Martin
Villaboy
T
here are some very good reasons why software defined
wide area networking (SD-WAN) currently sits at the peak
of Gartner’s 2016 Networking Hype Cycle. The demands
placed on the enterprise WAN have changed dramatically
during the past several years, and SD-WAN represents the
first opportunity for a significant upgrade to wide area network architec-
ture and design since multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) established
its dominance more than a decade ago.
Quite simply, whereas traditional WAN architectures, including
MPLS, were designed and deployed in an era when applications pri-
marily resided in data centers, SD-WAN provides a new strategy for
SD-WAN
and its
relationship
with MPLS