Silver Peak’s David Hughes

Silver Peak, the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) provider, is celebrating its 600th customer.

The Santa Clara, California-based vendor announced Monday that 600 enterprise clients have deployed its Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN offering. Silver Peak has existed since 2004 and is known as one of the largest providers in the SD-WAN market. Frost & Sullivan puts Silver Peak at third in market share with 12.7 percent, trailing VeloCloud and Cisco-Viptela.

“We think it is not just indicative of Silver Peak’s success, but also of the acceleration and adoption of SD-WAN by enterprises around the world,” Silver Peak CEO David Hughes said of the 600 customers.

And the 600 customer milestone is a show of strength. As large companies like VMware and Cisco acquire SD-WAN companies, access to a large customer base becomes even more important to the rest of the market. Hughes told Channel Partners last month that his company’s 13 years in the industry gives it the necessary scale it needs to stay competitive.

“I think as we move into the next phase of the market, if you haven’t already got scale, if you haven’t already got hundreds of customers and a growing business, it’s going to be really challenging,” he said at the time.

Hughes tells Channel Partners that customer deployments of EdgeConnect have tripled year-over-year since it launched two years ago.

“When you’re first starting out, it’s easy to triple, but we’re two-and-a-bit years in now, and this isn’t tripling small numbers,” Hughes said. “Tripling from 200 to 600 customers is actually pretty significant.”

Multiple customers offered reviews of the EdgeConnect solution.

CorTrust Bank, a South Dakota-based financial institution serving 25 locations in South Dakota and Minnesota, reported that help desk calls and general user experience were suffering from voice and banking applications performing poorly via broadband.

“Following our deployment of the EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution, we were able to simplify and reduce management overhead across our branch locations, fully leverage broadband to connect our users to applications and user calls to our help desk promptly ceased,” said Rick Herrold, the company’s information secrity officer. “The Silver Peak solution has helped us to increase business efficiency while maintaining our service commitments to customers.”

IMMI, an Indiana-based manufacturer of vehicle safety systems, more seamlessly connected its remote sites to its WAN using Edge Connect.

“IMMI is a classic business case for SD-WAN, and Silver Peak has clearly emerged as the leader in that market. We’ve spent years struggling to keep our remote sites connected to our WAN by using outdated routers and firewalls, and with so many of our facilities in foreign markets, we also needed a solution that would provide better speed and reliability,” said Tom Braden, vice president of enterprise technology at IMMI. “Unity EdgeConnect, with advanced capabilities like Unity Boost and Forward Error Correction has transformed those sites, putting their WAN performance on par with our domestic plants, which translates into real-world advantages for our business.”