SD-WAN’s popularity is raising the stakes for channel partners.

The business world is coming around to the benefits of this hot technology. Damon Ennis, Silver Peak senior vice president of products, said businesses are seeing the value of moving away from rigid “router-centric” WAN architectures.

Silver Peak’s Damon Ennis

“SD-WAN eliminates the need for legacy routers, firewalls and costly MPLS networks and simplifies the WAN edge by unifying SD-WAN, firewall, segmentation, routing, WAN optimization and application visibility and control in a single platform,” Ennis said. “Centralized SD-WAN management delivers the ultimate quality of experience for network managers by providing complete observability and control of the entire WAN from a single pane of glass.”

SD-WAN entering the mainstream should be an invitation for partners to step up their games.

Did your firm start selling SD-WAN before the rest of your competitors? Congratulations, but now’s not the time to rest on your laurels. According to Heavy Reading, 61% of partners sold SD-WAN in 2018. Everyone’s knocking on the customer’s door today to pitch the technology. And the buyers know more than they did in previous years.

Aryaka’s David Ginsburg

“Enterprises now understand that SD-WAN isn’t just a simple router replacement. It consists of multiple capabilities, and if deployed by IT, it requires additional expertise,” said David Ginsburg, Aryaka’s vice president of product and solutions marketing. “This understanding will help drive the managed services market, but IT managers will look closely at their desired business outcomes versus just looking at the raw technology. SD-WAN MSPs and their partners who can effectively communicate this will succeed.”

We’ve outlined eight considerations to help you meet your customers’ goals and challenges with SD-WAN. Scroll through the gallery below to learn about how security, automation, vendor-agnosticism and other priorities should factor into how you position SD-WAN services.

You should also check out part one in our series, “8 Big SD-WAN Trends and Predictions.”