News Update from the SD-WAN World

July 4th weekend might be behind us, but now’s still a good time to catch up on your reading. Here’s a roundup of some of the important introductions and commentary from the SD-WAN world.

Silver Peak Announces Client, Funding

Silver Peak made two significant announcements in late June. The company announced a new customer —  Mazars, a top ten accountancy firm in the U.K. The company is using the Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN to connect internal branch offices to the cloud.

The deployment includes the data-center at its Tower Hill, London headquarters, 16 branches in the U.K. and five international locations including Sydney, Delhi and New York City. The deployment supports 2,200 employees. The company said that traffic had been cut by more than 40 percent at each location.

Silver Peak also announced a $90 million strategic investment from TCV. The firm’s general partner, Tim McAdam, will join the Silver Peak board of directors. The press release says that TCV has backed Airbnb, ExactTarget, Genesys, Netflix, Rapid 7, Redback Networks, Splunk, Spotify, Zillow and others.

Ericsson Partnering with Startup Mode

Ericsson and startup Mode are partnering on a new enterprise SD-WAN backbone, as we noted in our past post. Mode, which emerged last month from stealth, is developing a platform that it claims can shift traffic intelligently in milliseconds. The company has raised $16 million in Series B funding led by GV, which followed an $8 million Series A round led by NEA last year.

Good 1st Quarter for SD-WAN Vendors: IHS Markit

First quarter revenues from SD-WAN appliances and control management software reached $162 million, according to IHS Markit’s DC Network Equipment Tracker. The results, which were reported by Light Reading, were 12 percent over the previous quarter and were 2.3 times the first quarter of 2017. VMware, which acquired VeloCloud, holds a 19 percent market share. Aryaka is second with 18 percent and Silver Peak third with 12 percent.

Zscaler, Microsoft Working Together

Zscaler and Microsoft used Zenith Live late last month to announce close-loop integration between Microsoft Cloud App Security and Zscaler’s cloud access security broker (CASB).

“With this new Zscaler closed-loop integration, joint customers can now leverage the power of Microsoft Cloud App Security within Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security and the Zscaler platform to discover and control cloud applications regardless of location or connection,” the press release says. “The new integration helps customers perform comprehensive risk assessments of all their cloud services, enforce application control policies, and define risk profiles around key initiatives like GDPR compliance and data protection.”

Juniper Networks Enhances Contrail, Goes Active-Active

Juniper made several announcements in June, including an expansion of its campus portfolio and enablement of a common campus and datacenter use architecture.

The company upgraded its Contrail SD-WAN, which is aimed at the branch office. The platform now supports fine-grained Application Quality of Experience (AppQoE). This adds visibility and dynamic management to individual granular application session performance for what the vendors claims is more than 3,700 unique applications. Examples of apps that can use AppQoE are Microsoft Outlook, Sharepoint and Skype for Business.

“Based on real-time analysis of application traffic in Juniper’s NFX, SRX and vSRX Series WAN edge endpoints, customers can tune application performance to and from the branch using Contrail Service Orchestration managed policies,” the press release says. “This gives enterprise IT managers the ability to dynamically prioritize business-critical application traffic based on business policy intent.”

Juniper also said that its NFX and SRX series branch devices now support active-active clustering. This doubles connectivity and reliability over any type of WAN connectivity, the company says. The company also announced a 5-step multicloud migration framework for campus and branch networks and a reseller agreement with Aerohive Networks.

Aryaka Lands Metal Multinational Makino

Aryaka announced late last month that Makino, a Japanese multinational metal cutting and manufacturing firm, will uses its SD-WAN-as-a-service platform to link Japan, other Asian locations, the Americas and Europe.

Makino serves the aerospace, automotive, and construction industries. The goals are to improve speed and performance of international data transfer and synchronization; seamlessly transition to the cloud and improve voice and video communications for partners and customers. The aim is to house 90 percent of its applications in the cloud.

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