Post $45 Million Investment, Aryaka Predicts Partner Opportunities

Aryaka Networks, the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) provider, plans to help its partner grow as it grows globally.

The Milpitas, California-based company announced last month that it has secured $45 million dollars in new funding from investors, including Third Point Ventures and Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners,

Aryaka also has recently announced partnerships with Avant, and most recently, PlanetOne.

Gary Sevounts, chief marketing officer for Aryaka, spoke to Channel Partners about how his company will use the funding and the impact it will have on the channel.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Channel Partners: How are you going to use this new funding?

Gary Sevounts: We’re going to spend it on furthering our global reach as well as even more development, sales, marketing, partner enablement. Those are the key areas that we’re focusing on.

CP: What kind of impact do you think this will have on members of Aryaka’s partner program?

GS: It’s going to be more support, more partner enablement, more opportunities to work together. Aryaka has a great solution that our partners are selling, so it’s going to be more opportunities for them. The more we market, the more we talk about our solution, the more interested they get — and the more we enable them, it becomes easier and easier for them to sell.

CP: What do these partners typically look like?

GS: We have several types of partners. We work very closely with master service agents like Avant, Intelisys and some others. Through them we work with subagents. A lot of those subagents are talking to customers who realize that their MPLS is not good enough anymore. They’re look for alternatives so they come to [the subagents] for a solution, and if they recommend Aryaka, they go with us. That’s one profile. The other ones are system integrators. Companies have outsourced their IT or networking to them, and they have tens or hundreds of companies that they’re managing [the] networks [of], and they have [sic.] MPLS providers they’re dealing with. So they’re changing that completely and reselling Aryaka instead. And then we work with some of the progressive telcos that are looking for connectivity beyond MPLS.

CP: Can you tell us more about why these investors chose Aryaka?

GS: For the longest time, big telcos have been saying that MPLS is the only way to go, and now they’re realizing that their customers are demanding solutions that address issues MPLS doesn’t address. A lot of them have been partnering with regional SD-WAN providers, but Deutsche Telekom saw an opportunity to go further and invest in a global SD-WAN solution. It’s not normal. There hasn’t been any other investment in global SD-WAN. Prior to that, Verizon invested in regional SD-WAN – a company called Versa – but nobody else has gone to cover the global SD-WAN space, which is very different. That’s what’s so exciting and different about this announcement.

CP: What else should we know about Aryaka?

GS: What’s critical here is that we have been growing really quickly. We doubled our revenue last year, and we’ve had five consecutive quarters of over 100 percent year-over-year growth. We now have passed over 500 global enterprises in our portfolio. Those are not mom-and-pop shops; those are global enterprises. We’re a company with a rapid growth, moving very fast, getting a lot of interest from partners and customers, and this investment validates our message, our approach to the market. We have a very unique solution, and we’re really excited to take it to the next level with our partners.