Service providers drive new managed SD-WAN services

When SD-WAN first began capturing the media spotlight in 2015, many carriers initially viewed the technology as a potential threat to their business.

Fast forward two years and it's become clear that SD-WAN provides a new way for service providers to address the changing connectivity needs of the enterprise. As enterprise applications migrate to the cloud, a new set of opportunities has emerged for advanced managed service offerings.

While some of the initial messaging around SD-WAN focused on the potential cost savings of using broadband connectivity, there are many other and more important drivers for SD-WAN that include:

• Higher availability and better application consistency by combining multiple access technologies with packet-based bonding
• More flexible and granular internet breakout policies
• Improved security via edge-to-edge micro-segmentation of traffic

And most importantly, SD-WAN provides the opportunity to rethink the branch and displace decades-old multi-service branch router architectures with a simple, cloud-first SD-WAN edge or universal CPE.

Enabling service providers to leverage SD-WAN

Enterprise IT organisations are continually evaluating what IT initiatives to in-source or out-source and WAN services are no exception.

For every enterprise IT organisation that implements its own SD-WAN overlay (and we've seen more than 400 do that with our own technology since launch), there are other enterprises that prefer to implement a turn-key managed SD-WAN service.

They have been asking service providers to deliver comprehensive managed SD-WAN services and, starting approximately a year ago, we've seen a surge of interest from service providers looking to integrate our SD-WAN solution into their managed WAN service offerings.

To enable service providers to leverage Silver Peak technology in managed service offerings, we've complemented our solution with many service provider specific capabilities like web-scale multi-tenant management and comprehensive MPLS-VPN and BGP interoperability.

We're continuing to work with our service provider partners to deliver the features they need to build compelling managed WAN services.

Recently we announced the latest in a series of service provider partnerships, this time with China Telecom.

Through a new global partnership, China Telecom will deliver fully managed SD-WAN services based on our solutions to its multinational enterprise clients.

The new managed SD-WAN services enable China Telecom to cost effectively address the international connectivity and performance and security requirements for multi-national enterprises based in the People's Republic of China (PRC) seeking to expand out of region. And it will enable China Telecom to attract new multinational clients seeking to expand into and across the PRC.

We're excited by the productivity and agility that SD-WAN can deliver to enterprises, whether they choose to implement their own solutions with our help or elect to go with a turn-key fully managed SD-WAN service from one of our growing list of service provider partners.

By David Hughes, CEO, Silver Peak