One of the fiercest sectors of competition in all of IT is focused on the race to replace traditional routers with software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs). An SD-WAN makes it simpler to employ a combination of public Internet and leased lines to route traffic more efficiently to either a data center or a public cloud. There’s no longer a need to backhaul all the network traffic from a branch office to a data center before sending it on to its ultimate destination.
One of the vendors driving this transition is Talari Networks, which just named George Just to be its vice president of worldwide channel sales. Prior to joining Talari, Just was the director of sales for Alcatel Internetworking, a post he assumed when Alcatel acquired Xylan.
Just says he has a lot of experience navigating the historical tension between solution providers and carriers. That latter often give away hardware at cost or lower to retain services business. One of the reasons Just says he’s excited about Talari is that SD-WANs enable solution providers to better isolate their customers from the underlying transport services provided by a carrier. At any moment in time, the SD-WAN empowers the solution provider and their customer to redirect network traffic away from any carrier.
Customers are keen to adopt SD-WANs because it enables them to more easily employ different carriers in different regions. The quality of telecommunications services can vary substantially from one geographic region to another. Customers don’t like to be locked into a global contract for a specific carrier when they are unsure what the quality of service will be in all regions. Most customers are also keen to reduce the amount of traffic flowing across expensive leased lines.
“There’s going to be a lot less traffic moving over MPLS lines owned by the carriers,” notes Just.
Talari hired Patrick Sweeney, formally of SonicWALL, to be its new CEO earlier this year. Sweeney immediately made expanding the company’s reach in the channel a top priority. Just says a big part of that strategy depends on a two-tier distribution program the company has set up through Tech Data.
Of course, there’s no end of competitors targeting the same space. But Just says Talari is only one of a handful of SD-WAN vendors that bases products on its own intellectual property (IP). That puts Talari in a better position to control margins, says Just.
More importantly, having control over the SD-WAN also make it simpler for solution providers to pull through add-on services spanning everything from unified communications to disaster recovery, says Just.
There’s no doubt that SD-WANs represent a major opportunity for channel partners in 2018. The important thing for them to remember is that opportunity doesn’t stop once the appliance is deployed.
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