Avant Partners With Aryaka, Cisco, VeloCloud, Others in SD-WAN Push

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AVANT is pushing to lead distributors in the SD-WAN space by adding several new providers to its portfolio.

The Chicago-based master agent is partnering with nine new SD-WAN vendors to give its partners a full range of choices.

“For right now, SD-WAN poses an unbelievable opportunity for not only the end customers but the trusted advisers that are going to be out there helping navigate the amazing amount of options that exists in the marketplace,” said Drew Lydecker, AVANT’s co-founder and president. “So for us, we have gone out and signed every major leader in the space, whether they’re regional, national or global, we have them. Whether they need an MSP or they need a carrier to combine it with, we have it.”

Lydecker cited an IDC survey that said SD-WAN will offer a $6 billion opportunity over the next five years.

“That is a massive, massive land grab, and we’re basically out there trying to get everybody their piece,” he told Channel Partners.

The SD-WAN providers are Aryaka, Cisco, CloudGenix, Masergy, SilverPeak, Talari, VeloCloud, Versa and Viptela.

Aryaka announced $45 million in new funding to expand its SD-WAN services globally on Monday.

“The world is being disrupted right now by companies no one’s ever heard of, and we represent them all, and our job is to enable the channel to be able to not only understand it but embrace it, and go out and be those organizations that every end company is looking for,” Lydecker said.

Lydecker said his company’s distribution strategy is to be much more than a logistics businesses. Doing only logistics “doesn’t work in this next-gen,” he said, adding that AVANT aims to be a leading sales enablement company for connectivity, colocation and cloud.

“What works is enablement, and what Aryaka has realized is that as we can help demystify what they do to the channel in general, then we’re succeeding together,” he said.