Microsoft just expanded its public cloud relationship with SD-WAN vendor Aryaka Networks.

Aryaka announced Monday that it has joined the Microsoft Azure Managed Services Provider program. Aryaka will combine its SD-WAN platform with Microsoft’s Azure Networking Services Virtual WAN (vWAN) offering, providing monitoring and analytics for Azure vWAN.

“We are excited to be working with Aryaka as a launch partner for our Azure Virtual WAN offering,” said Ross Ortega, partner program manager Microsoft Azure Marketing. “The combination of our global infrastructure and Aryaka’s dedicated Microsoft Azure access and monitoring will ease adoption of our networking services.”

The San Mateo, California-based company is one of the first SD-WAN providers to participate in the program, according to Aryaka chief marketing officer Shashi Kiran.

“The advantages of this new managed offering include an optimized architecture that permits enterprises to better scale their Azure VNeT [Virtual Network] deployments, a simplified branch to Azure V connectivity, and a faster response to service activation and change,” Kiran said in an announcement Monday.

The two companies are expanding an existing relationship. Aryaka is a Microsoft co-sell partner and a Microsoft IT co-sell partner, and it has been a member of the Microsoft One Commercial Partner (OCP) program since the beginning of 2019. Aryaka already offered direct connectivity between its global network backbone and Azure, but David Ginsburg, vice president of product and solutions marketing, said Microsoft approached Aryaka executives months ago about Microsoft’s plans to evolve its Azure networking services.

Aryaka’s David Ginsburg

“They found that there was a need to allow their customers to better scale their VNeT deployments, to better scale their regional and global connectivity operationally as well as topologically,” Ginsburg said.

Aryaka benefits by diving deeper into a fast growing public cloud market. Yahoo Finance reported that Azure’s year-over-year revenue grew 75%, compared to 42% for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which remains the largest public cloud provider. Aryaka also aims to capitalize on the trend of enterprises choosing to “consume rather than build SD-WAN.”

Stan Yarbrough, who serves as senior global IT architect at manufacturing company Element Solutions, said his company aims to become “100% cloud.” Element Solutions joined Aryaka’s clientele in 2015 to move from MPLS to an emphasis on cloud and internet.

Yarbrough said Microsoft and Aryaka have been Element’s key partners during its cloud migration.

“We’re excited to see the two companies come together to provide an end-to-end management solution for our network,” Yarbrough said. “Now that Aryaka handles our entire wide area network all the way into Azure, our lean and mean IT team can focus on other business priorities.”

Ginsburg said channel partners will gain stickiness and margin as a result of Aryaka’s membership in the Azure MSP program.

“It helps differentiate from just a basic SD-WAN service,” Ginsburg said. “I see it as a way for channel partners to up-level their offerings by really giving their potential customers a more sophisticated way of going into the Azure environment and scaling those deployments,” Ginsburg said.

Aryaka looks very different than it did a year ago. The company significantly refreshed its executive suite, bringing in Matt Carter as its CEO and celebrating another hefty round of funding.

Olen Scott joined the vendor in February to lead its channel program. He told Channel Partners in a Q&A that his new employer is working harder than ever to differentiate itself from the rest of crowded SD-WAN market.

“Matt and all of us realized that we have to do an even better job …… of recapitalizing our different platform stages to get the word out. It’s really important to get the message out and articulate these differentiators. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last couple years, it’s that all SD-WAN providers are not created even remotely equal,” he said.

Scott told us that Aryaka has virtually doubled its customer-facing workforce – which encompasses sales, channel, solution engineering and customer success – for the upcoming year.

“We’ve doubled that workforce globally and in the Americas for this coming fiscal year just to keep up with the enormous demand for our services in the marketplace and to enhance the customer experience,” Scott said.

Vertical Systems Group ranked Aryaka sixth in its latest carrier managed SD-WAN leaderboard. Aryaka scored third in the IHS Markit revenue rankings for the fourth quarter of 2018.

Source: IHS Markit Q4 SD-WAN Revenue