SD-WAN Roundup: InSpeed Takes Different Path, Teneo Talks Talari

Ed Basart hasn’t worked for a company he didn’t found in a long time.

The ShoreTel co-founder and now InSpeed Networks co-founder chuckles as he describes the entrepreneurial pattern that led him into the SD-WAN industry after multiple decades of work.

InSpeed Networks’ Ed Basart

“Lucky for me, I haven’t had to apply for a job for a very long time,” Basart told Channel Partners. “I don’t think anybody would ever want to hire me.”

That’s because Basart throughout his career has repeatedly founded companies in order to address trends he noticed while at his previous employer. The latest goal — this time for InSpeed — began as making commodity broadband work for voice customers, and that was just the start.

Basart now serves as chief strategist for the Mountain View, California-based InSpeed, which prides itself on having efficient, flexible and easily implemented SD-WAN capabilities. Basart relates those characteristics to InSpeed’s belief that quality, not quantity, is the solution to customer’s problems.

“We violate the primary dogma of networking, which is, ‘If you have a problem, buy more bandwidth,'” he said. “And that’s what every single vendor does, and SD-WAN is really a disguised version of that. They tell you to buy a second connection, which is more bandwidth.”

SD-WAN vendors often tout the ability to aggregate multiple WAN links as their best characteristic. But Basart says this usually results in over-provisioning bandwidth and incurring more costs.

And adding a second link isn’t the most joyous option for customers in the first place.

“The last thing the channel would do is say, ‘I think you should change ISPs’ or ‘You should add a second connection,'” Basart said. “It was like saying, ‘I think you have an appointment for a root canal.'”

He had initially bought into the second-connection strategy when he started InSpeed. But Basart realized as the company developed that the strategy might not be necessary if it optimized the connectivity. InSpeed filed a patent for Dynamic Bandwidth Control, the real-time measurement of throughput and adjustment of the connection’s rate limit.

This approach, Basart says, is a big differentiator.

“The idea of ‘if it doesn’t fit, buy more bandwidth’ is so ingrained in the mind of every single person who’s ever worked at Cisco or Juniper, that to say, ‘No, no, no. You actually have enough bandwidth. We just make it work right by getting rid of buffer bloat and adapting the load to the network conditions, and voila, we can delivery quality,’ is so weird,” he said.

The willingness to work with a single connection is one of the reasons Basart and InSpeed don’t shy away from the topic of MPLS replacement. Basart says some resellers present inSpeed as an alternative to …