Aryaka Targets SMB Customers with New Managed SD-WAN, SASE Offerings

Aryaka Networks, the cloud-based WAN services provider, is helping partners attract SMB customers with its latest product release.

The San Mateo-based vendor announced three new SD-WAN and SASE product lines, designed to serve customers of varying size and security needs. The three offerings are:

The three offerings join Aryaka’s flagship Prime Pro layer 2 offering, which offers advanced security features.

Source: Aryaka

Unlocking New Customers

Aryaka’s Craig Patterson

Craig Patterson, Aryaka’s channel chief and vice president of sales for the Americas, likened Prime Pro to a Ferrari. Smaller customers often passed on Aryaka because they lacked the mission-critical network performance needs of their larger peers.

“The problem with Ferraris is, not everybody in the world can afford one,” Patterson told Channel Futures. “Now with this new launch, is we’re bringing the Toyota, if you will, to market, which is going to open up the volume of opportunities for the channel community.”

Aryaka executives said the new options will help unseat legacy telco providers. CEO Matt Carter said buyers require solutions that help them navigate “unpredictability and change.”

Aryaka’s Matt Carter

“They are increasingly leaning on ‘cloud-first’ technology to help navigate change and fuel their transformation initiatives. In this scenario, old school telco managed solutions and legacy stacks like MPLS don’t cut it. They are not nimble enough for the new world, and the quality of experience they deliver is poor. This is where Aryaka steps in to deliver something refreshingly different,” Carter said.

Robert Bowling, founder and CEO of Aryaka partner TDM, said carriers are losing customers…… for multiple reasons.

TDM’s Robert Bowling

“Traditional carrier-led approaches to managed services are just not meeting the needs of today’s cloud-first enterprises,” Bowling said. “They’re not delivering the innovation or flexibility that IT requires, as well as a sub-par support experience. Aryaka’s new offers create additional relevancy for us. This is coupled with simplicity of deployment that will make the services very easy to consume for our customers, permitting us as an Aryaka partner to generate additional go-to-market momentum that results in growth and joint success.”

Customer Perspective

World Fuel Services is a Florida-based energies and commodities provider that employs several thousand people. The company had already been deploying the Aryaka solution, but it has added the vendor’s private access solution in order to better support hybrid workers. Moreover, Richard Delisser, senior vice president of global infrastructure, said his company plans to adopt Aryaka’s new SASE portfolio.

“We wanted to consume our network in the same way we consume the cloud, which is as-a-service model, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure the company we worked with was culturally aligned to who we are and who we want to be. Those are the two core reasons
we chose Aryaka,” Delisser said.

Other Enhancements

In addition to the three new offerings, Aryaka announced two architectural enhancements. The company launched FlexCore, a global level 3 private core that supplements its level 2 private core. Aryaka also launched a software capability called AppAssure that expands application visibility and control. AppAssure will go live for no additional cost in January 2022.

The SmartConnect EZ and SmartConnect Pro offerings will go live in the first quarter of 2022, and beta deployments of Prime EZ will start in January. Aryaka is targeting April as the date for general availability of Prime EZ.

In addition, Aryaka has rolled out what it’s calling “t-shirt sizes” for consumption, which allow to customers to consume the various offerings based on fixed bandwidth tiers. For example, the most affordable tier of SmartConnect subscribes the customer to up to 20 Mbps.

Zeus Kerravala, founder of ZK Research, said enterprise customers will benefit from the tiered options.

ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala

“These capabilities are based on Aryaka’s new FlexCore middle-mile architecture that should deliver unprecedented flexibility in mapping the network architecture to application requirements,” Kerravala said. “Finally, new, simplified consumption models should ease enterprise adoption and generate traction within the channel.”

Partner Impact

Aryaka last month announced sweeping changes to its channel program, including the end of protected accounts, quotas and complex commission tables. Patterson, who joined the company in the fall from Lumen, said he hopes to increase Aryaka’s channel-driven sales from approximately 90% to 100%. And that means reorienting the entire sales culture in the organization.

“We had some direct people that were focused on selling in a direct motion, and we had some channel focused on supporting their partners inside the channel. And quite honestly, we don’t have enough market share to create all these different rules and guidelines,” Patterson told Channel Futures last month.

Patterson said the portfolio update goes hand-in-hand with the revamped partner program. It expands the share of MPLS networks that channel partners can replace with the Aryaka portfolio. Patterson estimated the value of the MPLS market at between $40 and $50 billion.

“I view that as major pots of gold, sitting there ready to be taken by the channel partners,” he said.

Bridgepointe Technologies recently joined Aryaka’s elite “foundational” partners tier, which offers members leads from Aryaka’s account-based sales and marketing campaigns. Bridgepoint co-founder Brian Miller, said his company needs flexible and easily consumable technology solutions to sell.

“If these offers are easy to understand by our teams, then our customers will adopt them that much quicker… That is why we’re so excited about Aryaka’s new innovations that span multiple dimensions, with both right-sized offers addressing the needs of different types of enterprises, as well as integrating security,” Miller said.