5 Things Partners Need To Know About Versa Networks' New Unified Communications Enhancements For SD-WAN

Capitalizing On New Enhancements

Versa Networks Tuesday rolled out unified communications services for its SD-WAN solution that the company says that allows for the real-time assessment of voice and video sessions based on the quality and behavior of actual SD-WAN circuits through Mean Opinion Score-based traffic engineering and reporting for unified communications services.

The additions allow Versa Secure SD-WAN to be bundled with unified communications solutions with the embedded ability to set policies, gather performance data and analyze the quality of voice and video for a more reliable, high-performing SD-WAN.

Partners can capitalize on the enhancements by selling an improved unified communications experience, said Robert McBride, Versa product marketing chief. "[Partners] can go in with a message saying we can make sure your workforce productivity and communications are not being impacted as a result of network connectivity problems," McBride said. "This puts a very prominent service right there embedded inside the SD-WAN solution to make sure it's getting the service and quality that's needed."

"It increases the overall value for partners," McBride said. "They can put together a solution and go to their end-user customers and say we can make sure unified communications are awesome."

Here are five things partners need to know about Versa's SD-WAN enhancements.

The Problem

Versa's new set of enhancements are intended to solve a problem, namely that most SD-WAN solutions can't give real-time assessments of actual user experience, the company argues. Typical SD-WAN solutions don't base decisions on user experience, but on the quality and performance of circuits and the loss, latency, jitter and delay those circuits experience.

The Solution

The enhancements have been made to the Versa Cloud IP platform, giving it embedded voice and video codec support to allow for Mean Opinion Score-based traffic engineering and reporting for unified communications services. The new capabilities provide the Versa solution the ability to identify voice and video traffic, provide deep analysis, reporting and traffic steering to optimize the user experience.

The Details

Here's how it works: The additions give users the ability to create Mean Opinion Score [MOS]-based voice and video traffic-steering policies to ensure the best possible user experience. Users also can encode and decode voice and video traffic to get deeper into embedded MOS data in real time. The solution is now also capable of real-time and historical reporting of unified communications quality and can share MOS data to ensure performance.

Consolidation

Versa says the new features allow branch offices to further consolidate appliance and to move more decisively toward a software-defined model. The Versa Cloud IP platform can host third-party, virtualized Session Border Controllers via an embedded KVM hypervisor. The solution offers "single-pane-of-glass" management of network, security and UC services.

Partner Value

Partners, McBride said, "can provide a secure, software-defined WAN solution to their customers that also has the ability to optimize unified communications services across it, allowing for them to provide extra value beyond just connectivity, but into application and user experience oriented connectivity with security. As things are changing across the WAN in general, there is a need to change how the WAN is being architected and delivered. You start looking at application-level use cases and this ends up putting a very prominent service right there embedded inside the SD-WAN solution to make sure it's getting the service and quality that's needed."