Silver Peak Channel Chief: Now Is The 'Perfect Time' To Introduce SD-WAN To Cloud-Focused Businesses

‘Enterprises are making the decision now, and opportunities like this don't come around that often,’ says Michael O'Brien, vice president of global channel sales for Silver Peak said of the blossoming SD-WAN market.

In an increasingly cloud world, WAN player Silver Peak wants to help partners capitalize on SD-WAN opportunities.

"IDC says the SD-WAN market will be worth $10 billion by 2022 -- this is a three-year-old technology. The point is, enterprises are making the decision now, and opportunities like this don't come around that often," said Michael O'Brien, vice president of global channel sales for Silver Peak, at The Channel Company's Xchange 2019 conference on Monday.

SD-WAN opportunities are growing like weeds because of the projects that enterprise are pursuing right now, such as moving applications to the cloud or renewing existing IT infrastructure, O'Brien said.

"Are you transforming workloads right now? Perfect time to introduce customers to SD-WAN," he told partners. "Once they understand the power of this solution and they see what SD-WAN can to help them with connectivity, it's really quite compelling."

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Silver Peak, a company that does 100 percent of its business through the channel, differentiates its SD-WAN service by building WAN optimization -- the company's original product -- right into the solution. The offering also includes application visibility and a zone-based firewall via partnership with the likes of best of breed security providers, such as CheckPoint and Palo Alto.

Partners and customers can also integrate various third-party complimentary technologies into its platform, such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, O'Brien said.

Pat Kolysher, director of business development for Anchor Managed Solutions, an MSP based in Saskatchewan, Canada, said that his company is evaluating SD-WAN as an addition to its portfolio.

Anchor Managed Solutions' customers include healthcare facilities and a large trading firm, so its customers can't afford any downtime.

"These customers can't be down. I have one customer that has really expensive infrastructure and now wants to move to the cloud, so they are going to have to invest in SD-WAN," Kolysher said.

The Silver Peak Partner Edge program today includes several new customer incentives, including an automatic 5 additional points on a customer's initial purchase, and for any follow-on orders for a 12-month period. Silver Peak right now has a new program in beta that will be launched this summer that will give partners access to a metered billing offering.

"This is about helping you on the front end and building a recurring revenue stream with Silver Peak on the backend," O'Brien said.