VeloCloud Outcome-Driven Networking 'A Leap Forward' in SD-WAN

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VeloCloud Networks is introducing a software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) policy implementation approach designed to give businesses more flexibility.

The Mountain View, California-based networking provider on Tuesday announced “Outcome-Driven Networking,” a strategy that lets organizations orchestrate and automate their networking processes based on their specific goals and contexts.

VeloCloud’s Mike Wood

The approach is based around the tenets of abstraction and automation, contextual implementation and self-learning. The user sets goals for how the network will prioritize and transport specific applications, and the network automatically adapts to the desired changes using analytics and other learning features.

It’s VeloCloud’s first product announcement since VMware announced that it was buying the SD-WAN provider.

The company frames the new approach as an opportunity to “liberate IT teams from tedious manual processes.” Mike Wood, VeloCloud’s VP of marketing, tells Channel Partners the announcement reflects the changing role of the IT department. Wood says organizations are also asking IT to accelerate deployments while at the same time decrease those deployments’ risks. And IT needs partners help with those goals.

“What we’re seeing is that IT teams are really raising themselves to a different standard in terms of their relevance within the business, from being more or less of a cost center to now more of a team that’s focused on growth and revenue and profitability,” Wood said. “They’ve also been seeking – and with VeloCloud they’ve been able to implement – this model of taking the business outcomes that they have and translate those into actual actions within IT and within the network.”

An example is Microsoft Office 365, which Wood says customers continually mention to VeloCloud and its partners.

“I just talked to a customer yesterday who’s moving to Office 365 but also going to move to Azure in the services industry. Oftentimes, they desire to improve voice quality along with access to Office 365,” he said. “In the past, typically this involved backhauling these applications to the data center, mainly because there was one single internet connection that they had full control over.”
But Wood says that Microsoft’s best practices recommend that Office 365 run through each of the branch offices via a direct internet connection. And securing an application-based priority like that requires managing complexity and quality of service.

Key features include intelligent routing, policy-driven segmentation and one-click IPsec VPN.

Curtis McEwen, director of information services for Saber Healthcare Group, says the new approach helps Saber segment its network traffic for its six-state health-care network.

“The introduction of VeloCloud Outcome-Driven Networking helps us significantly reduce …

… manual effort to configure and maintain our network and instead focus on providing quality of service, reliable connectivity and reduced cost of operations,” McEwen said.

Dan Conde, analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, says VeloCloud and other SD-WAN providers are working to further tailor their offerings to meet the needs of companies in various verticals. The company spoke to Channel Partners last month about how SD-WAN is proving particular valuable for retail.

“SDN and its application in the wide area network as SD-WAN have greatly simplified networking and arrested the hardware sprawl in data centers and branches respectively, but there is still significant complexity in network configuration and management that needs to be overcome,” said Dan Conde, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Outcome-Driven Networking presents a leap forward in the evolution of SD-WAN to take automation and simplification to the next level by associating business outcomes to key technical capabilities.”

For more details on VeloCloud and its SD-WAN competitors, check out our weekly SD-WAN Roundup.