SD-WAN Roundup: Comcast, Open Systems, Ecessa Court Partners

Written by James Anderson
April 19, 2019

It's clear to vendors that partners are demanding the technology, and the vendors are responding.

… get access to American MSPs. The company has shifted to a channel-first strategy. Head of North American Channels David Nuti told Channel Partners that Open Systems is going for quality over quantity when it comes to master agent partnerships.

The beauty of Open Systems growing its presence in the Americas, Nuti told Channel Partners, is that the company is already mature, having started as an engineer-led security firm in 1990.

To call it an SD-WAN vendor would be short-selling it. The Zurich-based company also provides security as a service, security operations center (SOC), app acceleration and other services. Nuti said that it offers the “most complete enterprise technology overlay for the WAN in the world.” SD-WAN is a small component of the platform, according to Nuti.

“There’s a natural inclination to want to ride the wave of interest that SD-WAN has, even though it’s very difficult to find a consistent definition of what SD-WAN actually is,” he said. “I find humor in that. It’s one of the more abused terms in the industry today. Who isn’t SD-WAN might be a better question to ask these days.”

In fact, leading with only SD-WAN might be a great way to lose potential customers. Partners shouldn’t neglect the security story, lest they create a barrier-to-entry for themselves.

“In 2012 when I started to have SD-WAN conversations, that conversation could stand on its own. It would be in its own silo and be very unique, and nobody knew it. You fast-forward from there a couple years, and the security guys are in the room on the very first call, and they want to know what it is you’re talking about,” Nuti said.

We’ve seen a tug-of-war between networking-focused and security-focused vendors in the last year as the latter companies have been marketing their own solutions. Barracuda, for example, argues that the networking folks can’t be trusted with security.

So what do you bring up first to the customer: SD-WAN or security? There’s no right answer to that, Nuti says.

“What if you don’t have to have a predisposition on what the conversation needs to be and you can have it wide open and know that you have a platform that fully integrates that from the get-go and that there is no wrong starting point,” he said. “You can start from either end and have a much broader conversation than any supplier in the space.”

Ecessa’s Journey

We also chatted with CEO Mike Siegler at Ecessa’s booth.

Ecessa’s Mike Siegler

The vendor announced an extensive product road map in December, entailing all the enhancements it would make for its platform in 2019. Those updates include Layer 7 web filtering, and intrusion detection and prevention systems. Siegler told Channel Partners that security is “table stakes” for SD-WAN.

Ecessa will also allow its customers to connect to AWS or Microsoft Azure. Siegler said the message of SD-WAN resiliency is gaining traction with customers.

“[We’re] setting the expectation that outages should be unacceptable for customers at their locations,” he said. “And as we get that message out, people get it, and we make it a profitable proposition for them.”

Siegler acknowledged a common sentiment we heard at the show: that the SD-WAN market is …