Aryaka Opens WAN Op As A Service To Channel Partners

WAN

WAN optimization-as-a-service is an emerging trend in a segment of networking dominated by appliance-based vendor solutions. Aryaka, founded in November 2008 and with offices in India and Milpitas, Calif., claims its WAN optimization platform can offer less than 20 millisecond latency for 90 percent of the world's users of business Internet. The company completed a rollout of 25 points of presence around the globe in early May, and uses various techniques, from proxy servers to redundancy removal, over its own network to keep the Aryaka service humming.

"The old headquarters-and-branch-office model doesn't really apply anymore, and that's what traditional WAN optimization was built for," said Sonal Puri, vice president of sales and marketing, in an interview with CRN. "Now you have headquarters, different data centers, offshore teams, remote workers. Really what Aryaka has been about is going back and reinventing traditional WAN op. The partner program is the next step."

Aryaka's partnering model will encompass VARs, referral agents, service providers, infrastructure-as-a-service specialists and alliances with other vendors. The company's partnerships are just getting started, but its early partners include cloud and managed hosting provider OpSource, and several India-based hosting and solution providers.

Founder Ajit Gupta, who is Aryaka's president and CEO, was the founder of Speedera Networks, acquired in 2005 by Akamai Technologies. The company's executive team has several Akamai alumni; Puri, for one, was head of business development and corporate strategy for the application acceleration business there and ran the acquisition process for Speedera, where she'd previously run channels and business development.

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Aryaka's VAR compensation structure is still a work in progress. According to Puri, Aryaka is looking to a revenue share relationship with its partners, rather than offer a standard percentage-off-list-price agreement for Aryaka's service.

Solution providers could add Aryaka as an alternative to WAN optimization businesses they have with Riverbed, Cisco and other established players in the segment, Puri said. Now that WAN optimization is less hardware- and software-intensive, enterprises are looking at as-a-service solutions to cut costs and increase efficiency.

"There are Fortune 500 companies that love and will always hold onto their boxes, but even if you dig into those you find the actual WAN optimization appliances are only in 20 percent of their locations," she said. "They just can't justify the costs anymore. The combination of MPLS plus the appliance is prohibitive even for those guys."