Silver Peak Targets 'Very Large' Partner Recruitment Campaign For 2019

The company is seeking to work with new resellers and deployment partners as the market for SD-WAN heats up.

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Silver Peak is bringing differentiated SD-WAN technology and rich incentives in a bid to attract a significant number of new partners this year, the company's channel chief told CRN.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company does 100 percent of its sales through the channel and is "actively looking for additional partners," said Michael O'Brien, vice president of worldwide channel sales for Silver Peak.

[Related: The 6 Hottest SD-WAN Vendors To Watch in 2019]

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"We are in recruitment mode," O'Brien told CRN. "We feel that we've hit that stride in the product offering, that it is completely relevant for the solution integrators, the VARs and the managed service providers, to really make sure that they are addressing the customer's needs for wide-area networking technologies."

While O'Brien did not disclose how many partners Silver Peak is hoping to bring aboard this year, he described the number as "very large."

Research firm IDC has pegged the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) infrastructure market at reaching $4.5 billion by 2022, up from $833 million in 2017. Silver Peak has held the No. 3 spot for market share in SD-WAN infrastructure, behind Cisco and VMware, according to IDC.

Silver Peak differentiates its SD-WAN offering in part by integrating WAN optimization into its solution. The solution is also integrated with firewall, segmentation, routing and application visibility to offer a unified platform to partners and customers, the company says.

Silver Peak is recruiting both resellers and deployment partners, the latter of which bring expertise around implementing the company's technology. In many cases, Silver Peak is matching deployment partners with resellers who have interested customers, O'Brien said.

In November, Silver Peak launched new partner incentives that include up to a 12-percent rebate on the licensing revenue for the solution.

"It allows partners to enjoy not only a rich margin on the sale opportunity, but it also gives them residual revenue on the backend. As we collect license revenue, we share a percentage of that," O'Brien said.

That results in a "more lucrative" financial package for partners than what is offered by competitors, he contended. "Partners have really latched onto this," said O'Brien, who joined Silver Peak as channel chief in August.

Ferrol Macon, vice president of architecture and strategy at Duluth, Ga.-based Veristor, said the new channel leadership at Silver Peak has "really focused on maturing and growing the partner focus."

"They've always been a great partner for us," Macon said. "But they haven't necessarily had the same kind of joint go-to-market activities at a corporate level that we're starting to see now. There are more feet on the street with the channel program."

For instance, "we see much more co-investment from them as a result of this maturing," Macon said, pointing to increased MDF as one example.

In addition, "they have great technology, and we've won some very nice, big projects" by working with Silver Peak, Macon said.