How ThousandEyes, Now 100 Percent Channel-Focused, Optimizes SD-WAN Performance

At Cisco Live ‘22, CRNtv learned how partners can now predict when outages will occur across their customers’ networks through new advancements to ThousandEyes.

In a push to unify its portfolio of solutions, Cisco has taken steps to integrate ThousandEyes into its Predictive Networks Vision, where the solution can now optimize SD-WAN performance.

“As they’re adopting that SD-WAN deployment, they’re also taking an increased dependency on the internet,” explained Joe Vaccaro, VP of Products of ThousandEyes at Cisco. “We know that the internet is really predictably unpredictable, right? It‘s not controlled. You’re really working across the same networks that consumers are accessing YouTube videos on. So when you‘re accessing an internet environment for key applications and key traffic across your SQL, insights will be announced.”

The solution will enable partners to predict issues within their customers’ IT environments before they happen, allowing them to remediate those problems in real time. Cisco partner NTT, which also partnered with ThousandEyes for five years before the company was acquired by Cisco, uses the solution to support its clients who are demanding hybrid work solutions.

“What we’re seeing in the market is that our clients and our customers are moving to SD-WAN very aggressively and they’re treating the internet a bit like a black box. In other words, they don‘t understand that there are potentially optimal paths for their traffic,” said Joe Maissel, practice director of observability and AI operations for NTT.

To get the most out of ThousandEyes, NTT has complemented the solution with AppDynamics.

“The combination of ThousandEyes and AppDynamics is extremely powerful. Plus, the release of the new AppDynamics cloud products are perfect for the kind of hybrid environments that we‘re seeing. So both allows us to empower our clients to navigate these kinds of challenging, complex environments, micro services environments, plus the internet successfully. And then allows us, as a managed service provider, to deliver an exceptional service and to deliver the kind of outcome that our clients and customers expect,” said Maissel.

The new offerings come as Cisco positions ThousandEyes as a channel-focused product. In February, the company announced that ThousandEyes will sell exclusively through the channel in a push to scale the solution across its customers’ IT environments.

For more coverage, watch CRNtv’s video included in this article.