TekTalk Insights

Five Reasons to Still Talk to Customers / Partners about SD-WAN

We know it has been a few years now that TekEfficient has been promoting SD-WAN as the savior for your customers and partners, especially in a cloud world, but it is still not too late to engage.

Here are five indicators as to why 2019 is poised to be another huge year for SD-WAN.

1. Mergers and Acquisitions / Market Consolidation
As with other technologies, the SD-WAN market is starting to mature, which means you will see more mergers and acquisitions – think Telari + Oracle. More M&A means more opportunity to help customers migrate and integrate with new support systems, billing orgs, and other changes when big fish eat the smaller fish. This consulting engagement is more revenue on top of the SD-WAN revenue stream, offering an incredible financial situation.

2. Evolution of Enterprise SD-WAN Capabilities
Piggy-backing off the M&A topic, the more big fish that eat the little fish, the more SD-WAN product evolution is in store to address more intense, large-scale environments/requirements. While there are enterprise solutions out there, there are also cheaper/lighter solutions built more for the SMB that may trip up organizations with performance and compliance regulations not addressed by these offerings. Companies like Oracle, with one of the largest enterprise customer bases in the world, must take Telari and apply it to a discerning end-user, ensuring it hits on all cylinders with more eyeballs and a larger data set to pressure test performance. Early adopters may have to switch providers to get the new enterprise capabilities coming from an iterative product roadmap from more enterprise-focused SD-WAN providers.

3. SD-WAN as an Enabler of Higher-Performance UCaaS
Enterprise evolution is also a trend that applies to Unified Communications as a Service. The value prop of UCaaS is undeniable when compared to traditional telephony services – agile, more cost-effective, similar tool sets, ease of deployment/management and more.  Similar to SD-WAN, UCaaS will soon face the dreaded pressure test of real-world, production enterprise demand and if deployed alongside SD-WAN, can deliver the goods. You can help your customers/partners get there by providing the consultation they have come to love from you as a trusted partner

4. Multi-Cloud Mandates SD-WAN for Optimized Implementations
As more enterprises use multiple clouds, SD-WAN will provide a uniform fabric between physical locations and across cloud instances. Automation will make adding new cloud instances easy and fast, despite the inherent complexities and idiosyncrasies of each underlying cloud environment. By using multiple paths between physical locations and each cloud instance, an advanced SD-WAN platform will deliver a more reliable and consistent user experience.

5. Security Is Always Top of Mind – SD-WAN Helps Limit the Damage
As the threat landscape shifts, enterprises will search for ways to improve their security architecture and will more broadly deploy WAN segmentation as part of their overall security strategy. The traditional router-centric WAN allows any application in any branch to talk to any other application or branch meaning that if there is a breach anywhere, it can spread everywhere. Advanced SD-WAN platforms will be deployed to simply and consistently segment network traffic across the wide area network to limit exposure and contain threats.

Thank you for being part of the TekEfficient ecosystem and contact us with any questions / demand for SD-WAN technologies!

Sincerely,

Patrick Etheridge
CEO & Founder