Silver Peak, an arm of the Aruba Networks subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), has launched a certified deployment partner (CDP) program for select partners to resell and deploy the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform.
The program is primarily intended to increase the number of customers Silver Peak can support at a time when demand for SD-WANs is accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, says Ken Marks, vice president of North America channel sales for Silver Peak.
The program requires partners to acquire both sales and technical certifications. Partners participating in the program are initially required to partner with a Silver Peak deployment engineer to demonstrate requisite skill and acumen spanning initial design, deployment plan and post-deployment reviews. Partners already participating in the program include CDW, Intervision, INVITE Networks, Teneo, WWT and Xalient.
HPE this week completed its $925 million acquisition of Silver Peak. The goal is to eventually meld the management of SD-WANs and wireless networks in remote offices under a common management framework.
Rather than backhauling network traffic through local data centers whenever an end user accesses a cloud application, many IT organizations are replacing routers with SD-WANs that enable them to direct network traffic emanating from a branch office directly to a cloud service. That approach improves the overall application experience by reducing network latency.
Competition across the SD-WAN category has become fiercer in recent months as providers of firewalls have launched their own SD-WAN offerings that integrate security management. Silver Peak, however, maintains that partners and their end customers do not want to be locked into a specific security platform whenever they deploy an SD-WAN. Most partners and their customers already have security frameworks in place, notes Marks.
“Most partners and customers have already made that decision,” says Marks.
As a result, Silver Peak is opting to partner with the security vendors that provide those frameworks, says Marks.
It’s too early to say how the next phase of the SD-WAN wars will play out. Regardless of the path forward, however, it’s apparent everything about delivering and securing network services to branch offices is about to change utterly.
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