Silver Peak Launches SD-WAN Channel Program

There may be no getting around carriers when it comes to delivering managed services in the age of the cloud, but increasingly there are ways to mitigate their influence.

Case in point is Silver Peak, which earlier this year unveiled a network overlay for wide area networks called Unity Edge Connect. The basic idea is to provide a high level of security using public Internet connections rather than having to deploy an MPLS network.

To drive adoption of that capability Silver Peak this week launched a channel program designed for partners who want to either resell Unity Edge Connect or incorporate it in a managed service.

Bob Bruce, senior vice president of Worldwide Channel Sales at Silver Peak, said the company is trying to drive the emergence of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs), which by definition would give MSPs and their customers more control over where and how network traffic is moving over Internet services.

The Silver Peak channel program for Unity Edge Connect consists of Summit, Ascent and Registered levels. In addition, Silver Peak has a created a new SD-WAN certification for salespeople, which it intends to complement with an SD-WAN certification program for engineers.

Finally, Silver Peak has rolled out a new Basecamp partner portal to make it easier to access sales and marketing tools, while at the same time making available a mobile application through which partners can discover sales tools, watch training videos and register a deal.

Even though MPLS networks are based on networking technologies that are decades old, carriers still generate a fair amount of their revenue via MPLS networks, which provide both better performance and higher levels of security than public Internet connections. Silver Peak, however, is making a case that when public Internet connections are managed at a higher level of abstraction, MSPs can provide that same level of security while taking advantage of multiple Internet service providers (ISPs) to optimize network traffic flows at any given time based on availability and cost.

That capability, said Bruce, creates a recurring revenue opportunity in a market space that is significantly larger than anything Silver Peak has addressed before. For that reason, Silver Peak wanted to create a new channel program specifically for Unity Edge Connect, which Bruce said has a much shorter selling cycle than the WAN optimization appliances that Silver Peak continues to sell primarily through the channel.

At a time when software-defined everything is transforming just about every aspect of IT the WAN is clearly no exception when it comes to managing IT at a higher level of abstraction. In the case of MSPs, however, SD-WAN overlays provide a unique opportunity to apply that concept in a way that not only generates more revenue, but also puts them firmly in control over how and when network services actually get delivered.