“Show me the ROI.” This oft-repeated financial management mantra does little to excite the imagination about the strategic value of any particular IT investment.

Let’s say you could increase the speed of WAN file transports by 20%, reduce network outages and backup switching times by 10 minutes a week, or reduce shared application costs across a workforce by $50,000. You can run the numbers to calculate the ROI on such results, but considered in isolation they don’t stack into huge jumps in value.

Before taking a risk on any new IT investment, the business should expect a potential payback of between 5-to-10X, so we really need to seek out potential value wherever it exists to justify the investment into the future.

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As businesses around the world adapt to the changing dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for social distancing has unleashed an unprecedented shift toward remote and teleworking, creating a mass exodus of employees moving from branch offices to home offices. With thousands of businesses enabling a work-from-home strategy, millions of employees must quickly adapt to communicating and collaborating in entirely new ways to maintain business productivity.

Watch this on-demand webcast to learn how to securely connect a remote workforce to business applications in the data center or the cloud.

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A modern car’s parallel park assist feature is a great invention that saves time, but it can’t make intelligent decisions about where to park or take into account no parking zones and street cleaning days. A driver still needs to be present. That is, until fully autonomous vehicles become a reality. Self-driving cars will rely on understanding road rules and use artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions without drivers. Data will be constantly fed into the automobile, so as conditions change, so too will the AI-based decisions. 

The same is true for self-driving networks. An AI-powered software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) knows all the rules and can adapt to changes based on business intent. SD-WANs are paving the way for the convergence of networking, security, and AI to help businesses address growing data challenges as they migrate to the cloud. Simply put, next-generation cloud-based apps require smarter networks that just work.

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Keeping up to date on inventory, stocking, and data needs at thousands of grocery stores in North America is no easy task. That’s why C&S Wholesale Grocers decided it needed a major upgrade of its network using SD-WAN technology from Silver Peak to provide efficient, reliable, and secure communications among its data centers and warehouses. 

Founded in 1918, C&S is the largest grocery wholesaler in the United States. C&S recently embarked on a major network upgrade focused on implementing SD-WAN technology. The company selected the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform to enable more efficient and cost effective wide-area-networking (WAN) to support a variety of applications. 

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In my most recent blog post, I talked about the difficulty SD-WAN vendors have in finding their voice and clearly differentiating their value. My point was that if Wendy’s, Burger King, and McDonald’s could figure out how to differentiate their burgers and fries, we should be able articulate why customers choose our solutions over the 60+ vendors competing for their business. I started out talking about the business reasons why companies select Silver Peak. Now it’s time to talk about our differentiation at a product level.

How is our SD-WAN edge platform, Unity EdgeConnect™, unique? I’ll frame the differentiation around what our customers are telling us. You’ll notice a significant emphasis on our ability to improve application performance for any type of application traversing any type of transport. We’re the only company that first tries to fix problems with the underlying network, allowing customers to fully leverage all of their circuits, even in instances of degraded performance. Unlike others, we don’t just re-route packets in the event of transport brownouts and blackouts.

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We've seen many transformative changes in the market over the past few years. In 2019, for example, we witnessed router-centric and basic SD-WAN offerings beginning to fall short of expectations as enterprises began shifting toward a business-first networking model. We also saw an emphasis on cloud security, along with a bond forming between SD-WAN and UCaaS. We began to see a new set of emerging requirements for multi-cloud deployments, and the promise of 5G beginning to materialize.

So, what's in store for 2020? This is sure to mark another year of continued WAN transformation and a year in which enterprises can begin to realize a multiplier effect from their cloud investments. As the market continues to gain momentum, here are my annual predictions for SD-WAN and the future of the WAN edge infrastructure market.

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If Wendy’s, Burger King and McDonald’s can find a way to make it clear how they are different despite each offering hamburgers and french fries, why is it, five years into the hottest networking disruption in decades, companies are having so much trouble differentiating their SD-WAN products? (And, before anyone jumps in regarding their menu, yes, I realize the menu of these fast food giants has greatly evolved over the years, but the food with which they made their mark remains burgers and fries.) 

I understand that there are now 60+ vendors offering SD-WAN-like products, but even before the market exploded in terms of providers and adoption, even the top five vendors’ messages are the equivalent of a vanilla milkshake. When asked about some of our biggest challenges as a company and as an industry, I typically talk about the need to do some SD-WAN washing. In fact, I often share the story of how I attended a presentation at a conference and as I was sitting there, I closed my eyes and listened closely. My takeaway from the 60-minute discussion: “Wow, if I didn’t already know which vendor was presenting, I couldn’t tell who it was – everyone sounded alike.” 

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I’m going to say something you may not want to hear, or you may already know: implementing SD-WAN is hard. Among the promise and hype of automation, dynamic path selection, zero-touch provisioning and a cloud-ready WAN, lies a trail of failed SD-WAN projects, with many others struggling on life support. For many, the WAN of the future has failed to manifest into anything more than another hard-to-manage, costly IT project that has failed to deliver on its promises (or, has failed to live up to your expectations), but why?

The problems SD-WAN solutions address are not incremental change or gradual evolution, they are the result of industry megatrends that have upended the way we consume applications and connect our users, all in a very short period of time. These megatrends, such as Digital Transformation and the move to SaaS, IaaS and Cloud have placed new demands on network infrastructure, IT staff and application owners; requiring a complete rethink of how they are connecting locations, delivering applications and services and securing their networks. The sheer gravity of these changes, and scope of what needs to be done to support them, cannot be undertaken in an additive approach. Rather, they must be tackled as transformative projects that require a complete rethink of enterprise WAN design and strategy.

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As global enterprises continue to adopt and deploy SD-WAN as a key enabler of cloud and digital transformation initiatives, they must also consider the importance of infrastructure scalability to accommodate the dynamic nature of connecting users to business applications and services regardless of where they are physically located. This is driving an increased focus on ease-of-use, automation, and orchestration, which industry analyst firm Futuriom cites as one of the top features of SD-WAN functionality.

Why is this becoming increasingly important? Many large-scale global enterprises have multiple divisions, business units or subsidiaries that may each require a dedicated SD-WAN fabric to comply with company financial policies, geography, business jurisdiction or regulatory requirements or simply to create independent administrative domains. Each fabric can be individually orchestrated and managed yet still provides centralized network-wide visibility and control, including aggregated observability of the entire network.

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WAN edge infrastructure is one of the most rapidly changing areas of IT, driven largely by the unabated migration of business applications to SaaS offerings and to public clouds or IaaS instances. As reported recently by Forbes, 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be hosted in the cloud by 2020^[1]. No longer centrally hosted solely in corporate data centers, applications are now hosted anywhere, and often in multiple locations. 

SaaS and IaaS providers strategically host their services in multiple data centers around the globe in metropolitan cities where business users are located. Connecting users to the closest SaaS and IaaS instances minimizes data transmission latency or delay and delivers the highest cloud application performance to end users. 

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This is the first installment of a multi-part blog series that will provide an overview of how technology is dramatically reshaping the healthcare industry and how the wide area network (WAN) can significantly affect innovation acceleration and customer satisfaction in this sector.

Like many other industries, the healthcare industry is also undergoing a digital transformation. And, despite being always considered “behind the times” in leveraging information technology, the delivery of healthcare services is becoming more and more modern and data-driven each day. 

The evolution in data, mobile and cloud technologies is driving healthcare providers to shift from a provider-driven toward a patient-centric business model. Patients today have the same expectations of healthcare providers as they have of any retailer or any other product or service, and they want healthcare on their own schedule and even on-demand.

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For Michael Soler, a senior infrastructure manager at Westcon-Comstor, a major IT distributor, moving to a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) was as much about taking control of the network as it was about saving money.

The move accomplished both, according to Soler. 

“It’s been a very successful story,” says Soler. “We have gained visibility, and this means control. I can see which users are using which applications, and we can look at bandwidth. We wanted to save money and we greatly succeeded.”

Of course, there is more to the story than that. Soler says moving to an SD-WAN platform, built by Silver Peak, accomplished many goals at once. These included:

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I just left another CIO meeting with a Fortune 100 prospect who was wondering, “why Silver Peak versus the 800-pound gorilla in the networking space that offers several different ‘SD-WAN’ offerings?” The challenge she faced wasn’t about whether it was the best solution or not - Silver Peak cruised through the technical evaluation, easily winning the technical recommendation. What she really wanted to know is if she should trust the future of her next Wide Area Network (WAN) to a private company.

This is a challenge we at Silver Peak face in seemingly every account we earn. The technical part isn’t the hard part, as we consistently win product evaluations and bakeoffs. What we have to prove is that it’s actually less risky to choose Silver Peak as the platform to build their next generation WAN on when compared to trying to stretch a Cisco router-centric model. 

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Keeping an SD-WAN in Harmony with the Business Requires a Great Orchestrator

According to Merriam-Webster, orchestration is defined as 1: the arrangement of a musical composition for performance by an orchestra (a group of musicians including especially string players organized to perform ensemble music); 2: harmonious organization

If you’ve ever attended the symphony, you have probably noticed the vibrant movement of the conductor waving his baton in front of the orchestra. The conductor has one of the most visible jobs in the music world, but despite this, many concertgoers are likely unclear about what the conductor is really doing. The conductor’s job is to assign different instruments to the musicians that play the different elements that make up the musical composition. The primary goal of the conductor is to orchestrate harmony across all of the instruments so that every instrument is audible. However, the conductor doesn’t simply keep the orchestra in time or harmony, most importantly, he serves as a messenger for the composer. The conductor intrinsically understands the music and communicates it to the musicians using his baton so that the orchestra can transmit a cohesive view of the music to the audience.

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Late last year I moderated a MicroScope roundtable in the UK on the challenges and opportunities of SD-WAN. The representatives included 12 leading SD-WAN vendors, including Michael O’Brien, vice president of worldwide channel sales for Silver Peak. I started off the discussion by introducing a data point from a TechTarget survey (TechTarget owns MicroScope) that only 26 percent of companies surveyed had an SD-WAN deployment underway. This spans any stage of the deployment cycle, including testing. Given the hype around SD-WAN and how many conversations I have with IT leaders about it, this number seemed low to me, so I wanted to get a better feel for what the leading vendors thought about it. 

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Deployment flexibility is one of the most interesting aspects of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. Some solution providers offer total flexibility, while others are quite prescriptive. 

EMA has studied SD-WAN deployment flexibility and found a wide variety of enterprise strategies in practice today. Individual network teams will have to decide for themselves what works for them. EMA identified several aspects of SD-WAN deployment flexibility that enterprises should consider when selecting a solution. 

Procurement Flexibility: Selecting Your Solution Provider

First, there is the question of procurement strategy. Like many classes of technology, enterprises have many options for buying and installing SD-WAN technology. EMA found that the most popular approach (34%) is to buy SD-WAN from a WAN service provider or internet service provider. Many network providers offer managed SD-WAN services or simply resell SD-WAN technology.

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Improved network security is a top business driver of SD-WAN adoption, as a previous blog in this series revealed. However, SD-WAN isn’t necessarily an off-the-shelf panacea for all your network security challenges. While the typical SD-WAN products include some native security capabilities, an enterprise must take an approach that combines native SD-WAN security with integrated, on-premises, and cloud-based security solutions.

Some early adopters of SD-WAN have failed to take this comprehensive approach. For instance, EMA’s WAN Transformation research found that enterprises that have completed a production deployment of an SD-WAN solution are 1.3 times more likely than the average enterprise to have experienced a security breach in a remote site over the last year. EMA suspects that these particular enterprises have been oversold on the native security capabilities of their chosen vendors.

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It’s true that the early conversations about SD-WAN were all about cost savings, and those promised cost savings were to come via replacing MPLS with internet connectivity. To some extent, SD-WAN definitely delivers on this promise. That being said, saving money is not the real business driver for SD-WAN.

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Forty seven percent of CEOs say they are being “challenged” by their board of directors to show progress in shifting toward a digital business model according to the Gartner 2018 CIO Agenda Industry Insights Report. By improving IT operations, organizations can progress and even accelerate their digital transformation initiatives efficiently and successfully. The biggest barrier to success is that IT currently spends around 78 percent of their budget and 80 percent of their time just maintaining IT operations, leaving little time and resource left for innovation according to ZK Research*.

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