Silver Peak SD-WAN message getting across to partners

Silver Peak has seen an increasing number of partners embrace SD-WAN thanks to its efforts to promote the technology and the uplift that has been happening in the market.

The firm has been actively pushing partners to get skilled up around the software defined world and has witnessed increasing levels of interest from customers.

"In three years it went 'I'm interested in SD-WAN and maybe I will deploy 5 sites or 10 sites', to where it is now where customers are saying that they are all in and are switching all their network over to SD-WAN, all the 400 or 500 sites that they have. People are doing these full on global deployments at very fast rates," he said Damon Ennis, senior vice president of products for Silver Peak.

"The time is now and people have seen the early initial success and now partners want to get behind it," he added that it had rolled out an authorised deployment programme for those looking to get trained up in delivering SD-WAN.

Silver Peak has also been advising partners that the SD-WAN pitch has also needed to evolve to appeal to the pain points that customers are dealing with.

"All the initial interest in SD-WAN was primarily around the simple message of the cost savings of leveraging the internet versus MPLS. For us that message is far too simplistic and the benefits that customers are getting is the automation and being able to manage 500 sites from a single screen in a user interface and the capability from that screen to be able to define how you want that network to behave," said Ennis.

The vendor has seen the market doubling each year since it first launched its EdgeConnect product three years ago and it expects that trend to continue in 2019. To support that Silver Peak is looking to add 100 extra staff to its current 350 employees.

Ennis added that one of the challenges for resellers was to try to cut through the amount of vendors in the market that were clamoring for their attention.

In the past two weeks alone Cisco has made some significant announcements around the technology and Oracle has acquired SD-WAN player Talari adding to the sense that there is plenty of movement and choice in this segment.

"There is quite a bit of noise in the market with so many vendors, with each of them claiming it is something, that has muddied the waters," he said that Gartner's recent clarification of the market, with the release of a magic quadrant, had helped cut down the confusion for a lot of customers.