Talari Channel Chief: Acquisition by Oracle 'True Expansion of Business'

Talari Networks’ channel chief says his company’s acquirer, Oracle, will open new areas of the market for Talari and its partners.

The computing giant announced the purchase last week, and the deal has earned no shortage of praise from analysts and partners. And Talari’s most significant figure in the channel is on board.

Talari’s George Just

George Just, Talari’s vice president of worldwide channel sales, told Channel Partners that Oracle does not plan to “subsume” the SD-WAN vendor.

“There’s no desire that I can discern for them to just – for lack of a better term – ‘Oracle-ize’ Talari,” Just said. “They recognize us for what we are. They recognize the brand recognition that we have and the position that we have in the partner community.”

Oracle’s stated vision is to enhance its network management and session-border controller offerings with the connectivity and versatile “cloud application access” of Talari’s SD-WAN solution. Talari will join Oracle’s Global Communications unit, which Just said is already focused on the network and will allow Talari to be nimble.

Just joined Talari earlier this year to help establish the company as 100-percent partner driven, and he said Oracle respects Talari’s standing in the traditional VAR and agent channels.

“They appreciate … what we’re doing, and there’s no desire for them to stop that momentum at all,” he said. “It’s just to provide fuel for it to accelerate.”

Observers of the deal have pointed to the scale Oracle brings to the table for Talari, and Just agreed.

“We’re excited for the resources. The resource allocation and engineering and marketing is several times what we [have],” he said.

Talari’s customer base will expand as a result. Just said his company has played well in the midmarket, and this acquisition will help it grow in both directions. Talari will reach further down into the midmarket while attacking larger customers than ever.

“Up-market — certainly that’s a spot where we just weren’t playing at all,” he said. “It gives us entry into that, but we’re not going to forgo what we’ve built just to chase that. It’s actually a true expansion of business.”

The acquisition inevitably draws comparisons to Cisco’s purchase of Viptela and VMware’s purchase of VeloCloud. VMware’s transaction in particular raised the question of which “pure-play” SD-WAN vendor would be the next to undergo M&A. Analysts put the spotlight on Talari and Silver Peak, both of which have been around for at least a decade and have enough of a customer base to survive on their own in the SD-WAN market .

Just said Oracle’s acquisition has a unique end goal of using SD-WAN “in and of itself” to grow business, rather than using SD-WAN as a protective play.

Drew Lydecker, president and co-founder of Avant, called Talari …

… “the prototypical disruptor” of SD-WAN and the IT landscape in general.

“The network world has not changed much over the past decade, but enterprise network and data center needs are changing dramatically with migration to cloud services, growing mobile workforce and dramatically changing enterprise WAN network patterns,” Lydecker said. “The demands on enterprise application performance have never been greater.

Avant’s Drew Lydecker

One of the fundamental advances of SD-WAN is the enterprise regaining control of its wide area network. Lydecker called this the “democratizing utilization of carrier services.”

“The behemoths like Oracle are gobbling up the nimble innovators and disruptors like Talari as a way of leapfrogging into this new technology space,” he said. “SD-WAN is really about improving the application experience and enhancing the WAN security posture, and will be a phenomenal compliment to Oracle’s portfolio.”

The Oracle-Talari deal should close in 2018, and George Just said his sales team from Talari will still report to him. The excitement within the San Jose-based vendor is palpable.

“Instantly we’re in the game. Instantly we just became bigger than VMware,” he said. “That’s huge.”