Oracle to Buy SD-WAN Vendor Talari Networks

Oracle Corp. is asserting its ambitions to compete in software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) by buying Talari Networks.

Oracle announced Thursday that it will buy Talari in order to take advantage of its “failsafe” SD-WAN technology. A short statement from the computing giant said that Talari provides quality of experience and high availability that will work well with Oracle’s session border controller and network-management infrastructure.

Talari’s Patrick Sweeney

“Together, Oracle and Talari will accelerate digital transformation and cloud adoption by providing companies with complete enterprise network solutions that ensure reliability and performance of real-time communications and mission-critical applications over any network,” the statement read.

Talari CEO Patrick Sweeney wrote in a blog that both companies’ customers will benefit from the transaction.

“When the transaction closes, we’ll serve a vastly expanded landscape with Oracle. I simply couldn’t be prouder or more excited,” Sweeney said.

Oracle and Talari did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but Oracle said it will likely close by the end of the year.

It’s the third major SD-WAN-related acquisition in 19 months, following VMware buying VeloCloud and Cisco buying Viptela.

MNJ’s Ben Niernberg

Ben Niernberg is senior vice president for MNJ Technologies, which deploys Talari and is the vendor’s go-to managed service provider. He said Oracle’s entrance into SD-WAN makes “complete sense” as connectivity advances like 5G loom close.

“I think all of these providers are living in Layer 7, and if you’re going to live in Layer 7, [considering] the way in which you move the data and the way in which the edge of the network is changing, SD-WAN will be paramount in the success of that,” Niernberg told Channel Partners.

Talari has not yet responded to an inquiry about how the transaction will impact its channel program, but Niernberg ventured to guess that not much will change for MNJ in the short term.

“I would hope long-term that the financial backing of Oracle allows Talari to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise have the financial wherewithal to do,” he said. “And hopefully that will accelerate a product that I think is one of the true SD-WAN providers out there. It’s a phenomenal product from a technology standpoint, compared to others.”

C3’s Matthew Toth

C3 Technology Advisors founder Matthew Toth echoed the sentiment that Oracle resources will enable Talari to do more, particularly from a go-to-market standpoint.

“Some of the smaller SD-WAN vendors have great products but don’t have the distribution channels that these larger technology giants do,” Toth said. “We’ll see several more small SD-WAN vendors get snapped up by larger technology fish as well.”

Alex Hart, senior vice president of strategic services for The 2112 Group, called the purchase a “smart move.”

The 2112 Group’s Alex Hart

“The technology Talari brings to the table will help bolster Oracle’s cloud efforts and add additional features to their network-management offerings,” Hart said. “At this stage though, it’s not clear whether the solutions will remain as standalone or be rolled into other Oracle products; regardless, Oracle partners will now have another feature set that can be touted when recommending Oracle solutions to their customers.”

Talari made a full pivot into the channel last year with the appointment of Sweeney and channel chief George Just. All the while, SD-WAN vendors aside from already acquired VeloCloud and Viptela – and perhaps Aryaka – were pondering if M&A was in their future.

Sweeney told Channel Partners one year ago that …… Talari had a defensible enough position in the market not to need a buyer. He said the SD-WAN market likely could not support more than four organic companies — but he counted Talari in that list.

“We’ve been around for 10 years. We have a very large installed base. We have over 9,000 deployments. So organically, we can become large enough to be independent for a long time, expand product lines and things like that,” he said. ” But there’s no question about it; some number of companies are going to be bought. Companies like Talari could eventually be purchased. Other companies will have to be purchased, and that’s where you really divide the line. ”

Ben Niernberg said he wasn’t surprised to see Talari become the object of consolidation, but he didn’t expect it quite this soon. He thought Silver Peak Systems would be next. Both companies have been cemented within the top six spots on this year’s SD-WAN leaderboards.

Who might make the next acquisition? Niernberg said HPE might be considering a purchase, but the wide diversity of entrants into the SD-WAN market makes it anyone’s guess. Companies from security, telecommunications and cloud communications are making a massive “land grab” for SD-WAN supremacy, Niernberg said. And he said the land grab is happening more quickly than we expected.

“The world revolves at the edge, and there’s a play for those who own it,” he said.