SD-WANs have emerged as a hot new area of communications. Various sources expect this space to reach $3.2 billion by 2018, $12.1 billion by 2019, and $7.5 billion by 2020. And VC money has been pouring into it.
Just this week Versa Networks – a startup is backed by Sequoia Capital, Mayfield, and Verizon (News - Alert) Ventures, and led by brothers and Juniper Networks veterans Kumar and Apurva Mehta – emerged from stealth mode. And SD-WAN vendors Talari and VeloCloud met with me this week at TMC (News - Alert) Editor’s Day Silicon Valley to tell their stories.
Click here to check out my interview with VeloCloud. Below is a snapshot of what Talari CMO Kevin Gavin (News - Alert) had to say about his company and the SD-WAN arena.
SD-WAN, according to Gavin, adds intelligence to the WAN. Most WANs today are based on MPLS, he said. Talari’s SD-WAN appliances can be placed at each of a customer’s locations it wants to connect to leverage MPLS and broadband, but with more bandwidth and reliability than would otherwise be possible. The Talari solution is unique, he said, because it tags every packet so on the receive side you know about the latency, packet loss, and jitter of each path through the WAN, and you have a real-time view of all the links and their current quality so you can steer around congestion.
Companies that are readying to launch new applications that involve real-time communications like voice and video – both of which benefit greatly from quality of service and may require more bandwidth than the company WAN currently supports – may want to consider SD-WAN, Gavin said. A human resources application that involves video for training purposes would be a perfect example of where the application of SD-WAN might make sense, he added.
SD-WAN is also a good match for business functions like call centers for which reliability is of the utmost importance, Gavin said. If the WAN goes down, that means your call center is unavailable, and your cash registers stop ringing, resulting in lost revenue for every moment it is unavailable, he illustrated.
Talari has been in business for about eight years and offering SD-WAN solutions for five of them. Gavin estimates Talari has between 230 and 240 enterprise SD-WAN customers, and says orders in the $50,000 to $100,000 range are the norm. Talari’s original go to market was direct, but a year ago it started building an indirect program, so its fulfillment is now broken about evenly between the two channels.
Recently Talari introduced optical capability for its solution as well as the ability to run on VMware.
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere