**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of January’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

Citing the “unprecedented growth” in its market, software-defined wide-area-networking (SD-WAN) provider Silver Peak signed a deal with a major distributor Wednesday.

Ingram Micro has signed on to gain access to Silver Peak’s EdgeConnect solution, which helps replace or improve MPLS networks using broadband connectivity.

Higher than expected market growth led to the decision to choose Ingram, said Bob Bruce, Silver Peak’s senior vice president of worldwide channel sales.

Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2019 the number of enterprises using SD-WAN will rise from less than 1 percent to 30 percent.{ad}

“That’s a big market. That’s not one order of magnitude. That’s multiple orders of magnitude bigger than what we’re seeing with WAN optimization, which is still a core efficiency and technology of Silver Peak,” Bruce said.

He said Ingram was the best choice to help scale the Santa Clara, California-based company scale. Technical expertise and ease of doing business were the two main reasons, he said.

“When we looked at distribution, there [were] a couple of places that we could have gone, but seemed like in terms of broad reach and the ability to scale, Ingram was a great solution for us,” said Derek Dal Ponte, Silver Peak’s director of channel marketing.

Dal Ponte said Ingram is attractive because it’s looking for disruptive technologies to get behind.

“They are spending a significant amount of money in terms of acquisitions, and what they’re seeing is, they’re successful in the broad line of distribution, but they’re actively looking for where the future of the industry is going,” he said.

Mike Fratto, principal analyst with Current Analysis, says the key for Silver Peak is to “educate the market” about SD-WAN. Many end users currently rely on large service providers like Verizon, Comcast or Time Warner Cable, or set up their own   networking, which can add cost and complexity.

“What SD-WAN does, is solves most of those problems, but just in a very simple way. For a customer, you don’t have to know all of the technical details. You just have to …

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… know, ‘I want these offices to connect and I want them in this way.’”

SD-WAN takes less management to set up, Fratto notes.

“Because of the simplicity and the feature-richness that SD-WAN products offer, there’s a really good opportunity, quite frankly, to make a lot of money …” he said.

Silver Peak launched its partner program back in September, telling Channel Partners that the SD-WAN opportunity is 10 times larger than the WAN opportunity.

CEO David Hughes told Channel Partners in December that the technology was ready to go mainstream.

Bruce said the market has a huge external driver in cloud-based applications such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office 365.

“Those apps are accessed by the network via broadband,” he said.

He predicts “unprecedented growth” in both Silver Peak’s portfolio and customer base.

“We’re getting demand from the end-user community to talk to Silver Peak about our portfolio. We’re getting demand from partners to take a look at our portfolio, which is one of the reasons that we have the relationship with Ingram Micro – to meet that demand,” he said.