One of the hottest technologies in the channel is also one of the hottest opportunities for service revenue.

Brian Perrott and Devin Williams have both worked with vendors and partners to provide a full bundle of managed SD-WAN services to their business customers. They will lay out strategies and examples in their upcoming panel, “Stacking Managed Services on SD-WAN,” part of the marketing and technology conference track, sponsored by Cyxtera, at Channel Partners Evolution, Wednesday, Oct. 10, in Philadelphia.

Perrott, who founded QOS Networks, and Williams, who leads strategy for Converged Network Services Group (CNSG), previewed their talk with Channel Partners.

We have edited the transcript for length and clarity.

CNSG’s Devin Williams

Channel Partners: Do you think most business customers that demand SD-WAN want it as a service?

Devin Williams: Yes, businesses today are looking for an as-a-service model for SD-WAN. Many organizations, especially the distributed enterprise, are strapped for IT staff at each individual location that they run. When they deploy hundreds or thousands of SD-WAN devices to their organization, they need to be able to have the peace of mind that someone is managing and monitoring that network to ensure its operating at its prime.

CP: Could you share a real-life example of managed SD-WAN that was implemented well and benefited the customer?

QOS Network’s Brian Perrott

Brian Perrott: Inside the retail vertical we recently completed a 2,600-location SD-WAN implementation supporting over 5,500 employees nationwide. To start, we focused on the problems the customer was facing. Their current design from the carrier was inflexible, and they were experiencing too many service outages and voice-quality issues. They needed to remove distractions and create a network that would support the future growth of the business.

During the discovery phase we uncovered that the client was originally looking for an MPLS network to solve their challenges. They engaged QOS Networks knowing SD-WAN could be a much better fit and we focused on two things: What business problems are you trying to solve? And how do you envision a solution helping your business?

During the engagement, the partner introduced QOS Networks at the beginning stages of the opportunity, knowing we aligned in the multilocation enterprise space. The partner leveraged our ability to solve business problems on our SD-WAN platform and understood that our our technical team, PMO and executive leadership team could articulate the solution and drive home a win against the incumbent, carriers and business consultants like Accenture and more.

The solution was a fully managed platform using NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud, SolarWinds network monitoring and ServiceNow network management built with custom APIs between all platforms with full customer access. The solution included tech dispatch to all 2,600 locations (40-50 per day) to meet the customer demands around customer experience and downtime. The design also included cloud-based security by Zscaler protecting all outbound traffic for their 5,500-plus employees. The icing on the cake was our 24/7/365 NOC support including carrier SLA management and carrier ticket management from opening through SLA downtime credit collection.

The results were game-changing and included service delivered on our SD-WAN platform built for scale around edge virtualization, IoT and security enabling the customer …… to be ready for the future state of their stores.

We provide 100 percent up-time on the overlay network from QOS, which eliminated network outages. Voice-quality issues were resolved, and the customer had full visibility into network performance, application performance, carrier SLA violations and revenue recovery through our ServiceNow dashboard and reports. Focus shifted from IT as a cost center to IT as a revenue center — which was a critical component to the solution from the C-suite. The customer was then able to roll out their custom application 2.0 that drives top-line revenue but was not an option prior to implementing the QOS SD-WAN platform, due to problems we uncovered during the discovery with the customer.

CP: What’s one thing you hope the audience will take away from your talk?

DW: SD-WAN is a hot topic with a lot of noise around it; however, working with a managed network service provider makes it simple to be knowledgeable around SD-WAN, deliver the best solution to your customers and ensure that they have the highest level of success for their network in their organization.