Cisco Meraki Deepens Teridion Integration to Bolster SD-WAN Performance

The internet is good for resiliency and not performance, but two companies are asking why it can’t be both.

Teridion and Cisco Meraki announced a close integration of their services on Thursday. Teridion, which provides SaaS acceleration for wide area networks, built its services into Cisco Meraki’s MX Security and SD-WAN appliances.

Teridion’s Ed Wright

Teridion and Meraki were already partners when we first interviewed Teridion last November, but the relationship has expanded significantly. Ed Wright, Teridion’s director of product marketing, said Teridion went to work with both the sales and product teams of Meraki.

Wright said Meraki’s backbone uses the Teridion service for routing optimization and protocol  acceleration. He described it as “snap-in integration” that Teridion partners previously struggled to create.

“Our channel partners have been telling us that they’ve been trying to put together this type of solution, but it’s completely DIY. They’ve had to pull together carrier services or find other solutions that deal with optimizing the middle mile, tying that in with Meraki or some other SD-WAN vendor, bringing in management and alerting, as well as MSP capabilities if that’s what they’re interested in,” Wright said. “They’ve had to build this DIY solution that is best-of-breed but lacks the smoothness of end-to-end management, visibility, deployment, simplicity, billing simplicity — the whole bit.”

More on today’s @cisco @meraki announcement from our VP Product @proshan https://t.co/8naGEptth0 #sdwan #cisco #meraki pic.twitter.com/1P4HrHRPrA

Wright said Teridion addresses the reliability and performance gap of the public internet’s middle mile. The internet can create a cost-effective form of connectivity for businesses, but it’s not the “white, fluffy, lovely cloud in which we assume everything is just going to work,” according to Wright.

“… inside of that cloud is mayhem. It’s this very ugly, functional, but ugly scenario of the inter-connectivity of the different ISP and providers that make up the internet backbone,” he said. “It is not a network that’s designed for performance; it is designed for resiliency. That’s the thrust of the internet. And now that we’re deploying our applications across it, running our workloads across it and sending all of our site-to-site traffic across it, we have to build for performance.”

Businesses can either forgo the internet in favor of private circuits or try a network-based solution. Enter Teridion.

The company shared results from a five-site tested conducted with Cisco Meraki. Both lines below represent the Mean opinion Score (MOS) of a VoIP phone call via internet connection between Singapore and Seattle. MOS measures latency, packet loss and jitter. The orange line is for calls conducted through Meraki with Teridion. Teridion reported a 12% MOS improvement compared to the baseline internet.

Infographic courtesy of Teridion

Wright said Teridion is seeing organic channel and getting good traction from partners that have pre-established Meraki practices. He said Meraki’s strength in the midmarket opens up a bounteous opportunity.

“We knew that there was good Meraki market share, but my goodness. We had no idea there was this degree of owning the market,” he said.