The SD-WAN market is seeing more and more businesses opting to integrate SD-WAN solutions into their IT systems. One of the rising stars of the growing industry, Velocloud, has gone with the approach of making SD-WAN “as a service”. In an interview with CRN, VeloCloud CEO Sanjay Uppal explained his insights on the SD-WAN market, more specifically SD-WAN as a Service model.
“As things shift into more white-box and commodity hardware with software running as a service on top, the power is shifting,” said Uppal. “The move is afoot in terms of the power shifting to the buyer and they want SD-WAN as a Service, not SD-WAN as just another box. … No longer are people going to be locked in to custom hardware and proprietary platforms.”
VeloCloud, being under the model of “as a Service”, is precisely what sets it apart from the competition as no one else in the industry is following this solution model. Majority of the competition either sell it as product, software or event more recently as a cloud gateway. VeloCloud however, sell it to the customers on a consumption basis, what they need is what they get.
At the end of the day, if you go to an enterprise whether it be retail, banks or insurance, their main concern will be the business result or ROIs (return on investment). In which VeloCloud sells them solutions which are tailor made for their problems, not based on what is the highest performing model.
VeloCloud puts its efforts on the outcome that the CIO is going after and then all of the architecture and programs that they put in place for the channel really support that. This allows VeloCloud to go to the MSP and service provider and say, ‘We have a running system with over 700 enterprise customers. … We can train you on how to run this service, how to create demand for this service, how to train your people for it, how to do the logistics and support.’ That’s what the channel wants to hear.