Are you worried about deploying SD-WAN in your environment? You wouldn’t be alone if you were. The idea of ripping and replacing your existing WAN infrastructure can’t be easy to digest. There’s a lot of factors that go into building out a new WAN infrastructure that can deliver the kinds of features that you want to maximize things like application performance and enhancing the quality of experience that your users enjoy.
It would be much easier if you could just outsource the whole thing, right? Have someone come in and not only deploy your new SD-WAN but manage the whole thing as well. As nice as that sounds right now, reality isn’t quite as rosy. Most SD-WAN deployments that are done today are very much focused at the enterprise level and done on a customer-by-customer basis. There are some SD-WAN managed service providers out there but they have either built their toolsets themselves from existing solutions or they are so locked in to their specific offering that it is very difficult to change or modify to suit different needs of a new organization.
Change Your View
I had a chance to sit down and talk with Infovista about this very problem. They’re highlighting a new SD-WAN solution they call Ipanema. You might ask yourself what a new SD-WAN solution might highlight in today’s market. It seems crowded already with all the players that have built their own solutions or acquired their way into the space. Infovista’s Ipanema is a bit different though. They do have a lot of application intelligence built into the platform to help improve the quality of experience for users. But another huge area is they focus on managed service providers.
I used to work for an MSP back in the day. We found ourselves cobbling and scraping things together to meet the needs that we had for our customers. Whether it was monitoring networks or providing patch support services to them it was always a race to try and find a tool to do what we needed or get something operational long enough to fix the issue at hand without needing to dispatch a technician to the other side of the state. That works fine for static things or solutions that monitor the network. But you don’t want to try and roll your own SD-WAN from multiple different solutions! It’s an entirely different matter when what you’re trying to build is the lynchpin of the backbone connectivity for a customer or a group of customers.
To run a managed SD-WAN platform, you need to have something that is easy to manage and easy to deploy. Infovista has you covered on both accounts. Ipanema is designed to be easy to deploy across a variety of brownfield locations. Instead of forcing your customers to rip out their existing WAN solution, you can configure Ipanema to run behind the existing router like a transparent connection, or a “bump in the wire”. It can still provide all the great application management features that are a bit selling point of the solution while also doing it non-disruptively.
For MSPs, this is a huge win. You can provide services to existing clients with minimal disruption. You can create value-added offerings that can be enabled at the drop of a hat to increase revenue. Imagine having a system like Ipanema deployed to provide edge connectivity and failover and then offering an additional service of application performance management. No need to change anything on your end. The hardware is already in place. Just a small additional fee each month and we’ll optimize everything for you! You get the additional revenue as an MSP to justify the use of a solution like Ipanema and the customer gets all the benefits of using the features built into the box. It’s a win-win for both sides.
There’s a lot more to the MSP side of things as well. Infovista is also planning on building out an entire transit network to allow on-ramp to common cloud SaaS apps like Office365, G-Suite, and more. That means you’ll be able to take advantage of application optimizations for those apps as well as other non-SaaS apps. Which is a great way to show how easy cloud can be with the right tools in place. Being able to offer more cloud ease-of-use is a great value add for MSPs too!
Bringing It All Together
I liked the look I got with Infovista because it’s not just a run-of-the-mill SD-WAN solution. They’ve put some real thought into going after the underserved MSP market and added some real feature differentiation that allows MSPs to build on the core offerings and increase what they can add for the customer. I think once there is a wider deployment of these units and more emphasis on how they can help with cloud on-ramp you’ll see more and more MSPs start to adopt the Ipanema solution and on-board a lot of small and mid-sized customers.
For more information about Infovista and the Ipanema SD-WAN solution, check out http://Infovista.com
