SD-WAN Roundup: Silver Peak Harnesses the Channel, VMware Leads Rankings
… helping customers to re-architect their wide area network and move their customers’ business forward,” he said.
@SilverPeak announces expansion of North American distribution agreement with @SYNNEX to develop Silver Peak #channel & enable #VAR & #Resellers to build successful & profitable #SDWAN business practices. https://t.co/NEZblSgjd4
— HG Insights (@HGInsights_) March 20, 2019
The company scaled its partner program significantly in 2018. O’Brien joined the company as channel chief last June after leading channels at Aerohive Networks. The company at around the same time was accepting $90 million in funding from TCV with a goal to “expedite execution of its go to market expansion plans.” The Santa Clara, California-based vendor four months later announced several changes to its Partner Edge program, including financial incentives of up to 12 percent margin, “programmatic” deal registration and a demo platform.
“[We] made sure we have the right incentive and margin-rich opportunities for partners to sell Silver Peak and that we have the right training and development programs to make sure partners are successful in engaging customers and selling SD-WAN,” O’Brien said.
The company also created sales teams for EMEA and the service provider market and launched a program for partners deploying the Silver Peak platform. Silver Peak in January added Google Cloud to its stable of public cloud providers, alongside Oracle, AWS and Azure.
More than 1,000 customers had deployed the EdgeConnect platform as of last August.
Latest Rankings
Silver Peak sits fourth in IHS Markit’s latest revenue ranking. The leaderboard is one of many industry recognitions, but we in the networking media love seeing its quarter-to-quarter changes.
The results vary little in terms of position. VMware’s VeloCloud continues to dominate, with Cisco a distant second, followed closely by Aryaka and Silver Peak. Cisco dipped behind Aryaka and Silver Peak at different points last year but appears to have regained ground. We’re waiting to see where Oracle will land in the rankings after its acquisition of Talari.
Source: IHS Markit Q4 SD-WAN Revenue
Fortinet is the biggest riser in the leaderboard. Its nearly 200 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue increase puts it on top of the recent dogpile of security vendors getting into SD-WAN.
Nokia’s Nuage Networks remains a dark horse in this race. The vendor is powering Spectrum Enterprise’s recently announced SD-WAN solution and enhanced its own platform back in September. Founder and CEO Sunil Khandekar touted the virtualized network services (VNS) platform’s ability to deliver IT orchestration.
“Unlike other vendors that either have basic connectivity solutions, use proprietary hardware or need to cobble together multiple platforms to address enterprise IT needs, we purposefully developed our VNS offer on a single platform to give our customers a powerful, seamless and consistent set of capabilities across the entire network,” Khandekar said.
Only Infovista dropped in revenue, according to the study. The Virginia-based company saw a slight 5 percent decrease quarter over quarter, but its recently appointed CEO is priming the company for the 5G opportunity.
“It’s a great time to be joining Infovista,” the new executive said. “The opportunity that lies ahead to capitalize on the fast-growing demand for SD-WAN and 5G solutions and further grow in key sectors worldwide is immense. The ability to lead this next phase of growth is both exhilarating and humbling.”
Josh Bancroft, a senior research analyst who contributed to the IHS Markit study, noted that telecommunications providers want to combine 5G’s “network-slicing” with SD-WAN’s ability to seer application traffic to maximize industrial IoT and edge applications.
“The telcos view SD-WAN as a key way to ensure various traffic types are automatically steered to the appropriate links. It can also guarantee IoT traffic is prioritized over 5G, and other applications are automatically routed over broadband,” Bancroft said. “If they haven’t done so already, SD-WAN vendors should consider adding …
