Silver Peak Stepping Up with Enhanced Global Channel Programme

Silver Peak’s SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network connectivity) has been quite extensively covered by Enterprise IT News over the last year. Thus, when we had the chance to sit down with the company’s representatives again recently, it was more to broach on Silver Peak’s outlook and ambition for the Asean region, and in particular Malaysia and how the company’s launch of an enhanced global channel programme will further drive its lead in this space.

Dean Vaughan, VP Asia Pacific and Japan and Michael O’Brien, VP of Global Channel Sales were on hand for the interview.

Ready buy-in

First off, Silver Peak acknowledges that organisations’ C-Suite levels are already readily buying in to the rationale of a SD-WAN infrastructure and are keen on their customers experiencing lower cost pass-through. The impact to return on investment (ROI) is material.

SD-WAN is most suitable to cover exactly as its name implies, which is a wide area over large distances. As such, it goes within reason that a country with businesses that have geographically dispersed branch locations from the peninsular to the islands, will find a lot of benefit in a SD-WAN solution especially as cloud services proliferates.

This applies to Malaysia, and also to Indonesia and Philippines where endpoints are spread out across islands. After all, existing multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is expensive and inflexible with bandwidth wastage and performance degradation due to backhauling internet-bound traffic from branch to HQ, often requiring months to bring up a new branch.

Single pane of window with centralised orchestration management accorded by Silver Peak’s SD-WAN environment means it is as easy as a branch office ensuring its edge point devices are plugged in to the system and voila, all traffic from remote branches can be automatically managed, secured and added at HQ, without the need for specialised IT resources at site locations.

Advantage over formidable competition

Its raison d’être in the pocket, what Silver Peak has to contend with is the familiar big two competitors it is pitted against globally.

When Gartner published its 2018 Magic Quadrant report for WAN Edge Infrastructure which shows the big 3 global players in the top right-hand quadrant, C-suites tend to ask for all three quotes. VMware had acquired VeloCloud while Cisco had acquired Viptela to play in the SD-WAN space, and thus these giants present formidable competition. However, without just resorting to price, Silver Peak convinces its customers that it is the only SD-WAN player with elegant advanced WAN optimisation solution built from ground up… that are not cumbersomely fused together through acquisitions.

For example, Silver Peak’s innovative First-packet iQ identifies applications on the first packet. Using multiple techniques, First-packet iQ identifies more than 10,000 applications and more than 300 million web domains. First-packet iQ goes beyond typical Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and port-level approaches used today and it adds a cloud-hosted internet map and geolocation database in addition to real-time machine learning to provide the highest levels of application intelligence.

As the industry’s first and only first packet inspection engine, First-packet iQ enables granular and secure breakout of internet bound traffic to the correct path based on application-driven business and security policies. This eliminates the potential for wasted bandwidth and performance bottlenecks for trusted software as a service (SaaS) and web traffic. Trusted traffic gets treated appropriately while questionable traffic is automatically sent to more robust security appliances in accordance with corporate security policies.

The case for this region

In order to maintain its lead in the top 3 position globally, Silver Peak is taking steps to armour itself. Its recent launches of enhanced global channel programs that empower its partners with best-in-class enablement tools which are now more closely aligned between investment and reward, are expected to do the trick.

Details of this enhancement can be read here: https://www.silver-peak.com/silver-peak-launches-a-new-global-partner-edge-program

Silver Peak declares unreservedly that it is investing in developing partnerships in Malaysia and Asean in order to strengthen ground support for its users in this region. Of late, Malaysia has become a magnet for Cloud vendors with multiple ones looking to establish points of presence here. Our regulators have open mind-sets in embracing Industry 4.0 and even businesses in highly regulated industries, like financial institutions, are all getting smarter in what data and services they can shift to the Cloud, thus leveraging on SaaS dynamically.

Therefore, Silver Peak’s key imperative is to drive its channel partners to not sell hardware alone but to offer its advanced SaaS on top of that hardware or on top of Cloud services with a focus on its EdgeConnect products. With customers on SaaS platform, Silver Peak has a lot of opportunity to add new technology and augment services to its users.

Conclusion

In the advent of 5G, the company sees it as an enabler because today’s explosion of connected devices can only work seamlessly in a software-defined environment – an environment that will be hugely enhanced in an encompassing 5G environment.

To quote David Hughes, Founder and CEO of Silver Peak, 4G access has primarily been used (merely) as a backup to higher bandwidth broadband connectivity because of its relatively low capacity and high cost per bit. 5G wireless access promises higher throughput rates and if priced appropriately, will become an attractive addition to the portfolio of SD-WAN transport options which today include broadband, DIA and MPLS.

5G could deliver a unique combination of fast deployment, diverse connectivity and high bandwidth that accelerates the adoption of broadband SD-WANs.