What SD-WAN is all about.

If I am honest with myself, I don't get out much. Those of you that know me are likely laughing at that statement because of all of my travel, but it is true. When I am at work, I am laser focused on my job and when I get home, I am a father to 6 amazing kids, a husband of 12 years and a loyal friend. In what little free time I have, I read. Why am I sharing this? As I am beginning to write this, I realize, like most of us, I live in my own little world.

I try and get out, really I do. Like I said, I travel for work visiting with clients and hearing their stories and do my share of public speaking. Lately, the buzz has been all SD-WAN all the time. I open LinkedIn and someone is inevitably talking about SD-WAN. What it is, what it isn't and why it will one day rule the world. I can't open Chrome or Safari without advertisements for friendly competitors. For that matter, I cannot even log into Facebook without SD-Something. Right now, my world revolves around all things SD-WAN. I know I am not alone. Where did this buzz come from? It comes from our dear friends "the analysts." If they are even half right, SD-WAN is going to be incredibly disruptive to the telecom industry for the foreseeable future. So, today I live in a world that is family and SD-WAN.

If I remember one thing from the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross, it is Alec Baldwin's famous phrase, "always be closing." As I have matured professionally, I have realized that it isn't about closing deals but rather about learning. Always be learning will, in my opinion, take you further in this profession. The more you learn, the more deals you will close. I believe that always be learning facilitates always be closing. The more deals you close, the more you will want to learn. It is a powerful cycle. In an effort to, "always be learning" and working toward the coveted "subject matter expert" status, you need to spend countless hours mastering your craft. You read about your industry, competitors, partner community and market trends and predictions in the space.

So, let's apply this learning principle to SD-WAN, what it is and what it is not. First, SD-WAN is not about cost savings. I read an industry, "expert" today that classified SD-WAN as a "40% savings or more when compared to traditional WANs." Before we go too far down that path, lets step back in time a few years. Why did companies upgrade to the computer? Businesses didn't migrate from typewriter and triplicate forms to the computer because the computer was cheaper, the computer was better. The computer lent itself to productivity. It was more efficient. It was faster, better and more reliable. Consumers didn't move from the flip phone to the iPhone because it was cheaper. For many of these same reasons business leaders will upgrade to SD-WAN. SD-WAN is the most disruptive technology I have seen in my 17 years in this industry and it is not because it is cheaper.

To understand SD-WAN, let's get some background. We need to take a look at what the internet has done to the business world in the last 15 years. 15 years ago we used the internet at work for not much more than salesforce.com, foxnews.com and espn.com. In the last 7 years we have begun to use the internet at work for a few more things; Enterprise Resource Planning, Electronic Health Records, VoIP. Today, we use the internet for everything from; Point of Sale to Virtual Desktops and lets not kid ourselves, Facebook, iTunes, LinkedIn, Amazon and the list goes on.

As our reliance on the internet increases, the internets reliability has not increased. The cloud based applications that we are using today are some of the most state-of-the-art technologies in the marketplace. Many of you have heard me say this but I will say this again. It doesn't matter how state-of-the-art these cloud based applications are, they are only as good as the internet we know is going to fail. So, what are your clients able to do to support their businesses amidst the need for more cloud applications and the internets lack of stability? SD-WAN to the rescue.

For the purposes of a real life application, we will take a new client in Oregon courtesy of one of our favorite partners in the agent community. The medical clinic has 12 locations and was on what they called a "fairly reliable" Sprint MPLS with 10Mbps connections at each site. This client was experiencing the occasional Sprint outage and, the bigger problem, not enough bandwidth. The clients network costs were reflective of a 10Mbps MPLS solution but the price to increase the bandwidth to meet their needs would be astronomical; more than double their current costs. They did not have the bandwidth to support the cloud based applications they were adding to their network and it was time to make a change.

The suggestion from their Master Agent was to replace the Sprint MPLS network with two, count them, two connectivity solutions. The first connection would be a 100/100Mbps Comcast fiber solution and the other would be a Electric Lightwave (now a Zayo Company) that provided a 50/5Mbps connection. This was a brilliant idea but they had a need for a wide-area network and these connections alone did not meet their needs.

Here is where the fun begins. Again, the client needed a wide-area network to support applications, servers and basic business needs. In comes SD-WAN. What SD-WAN was able to do was to provide a software based solution to create the wide-area network for this client with considerably more bandwidth and the stability of multiple and dual path connections. Comcast and Electric Lightwave may still have their problems on occasion, but the client will not be impacted. Quality of Service, live in-call fail over, inbound and outbound load balancing, more bandwidth on a Never Down? solution. Does it get better? With the help of a loyal partner and their carrier relationships with Comcast and Electric Lightwave, we were able to create a solution for this client that would allow them to continue the practice of medicine even when the internet is down. We provide their patients and employees the ability to have business as usual, even when there is a fiber cut. We allow business to continue as is because, like nearly every business out there today, the cost of downtime is simply too great.

The graph below depicts a similar solution and the impact SD-WAN had on their network within just the first few weeks.

Final Thoughts:

The client went from a10Mbps MPLS to much more resilient, reliable network design with considerably more bandwidth; 150/105Mbps to be exact. This isn't about cost. The client spent more with this solution than they were previously paying Sprint and they now receive a more superior network with more bandwidth. When we presented the overall solution to the client, they asked for the paperwork, they didn't address the increased expense.

The old IBM days of FUD are gone. The idea that, "nobody ever got fired for keeping their [name your carrier] network are gone. Your clients needs have changed and they need something that offers them flexibility, methods for growth and better resiliency. A single threaded solution simply doesn't work any more. We should take a small step back as I previously mentioned a few times in this article that this isn't about cost but in all reality it is-the cost of downtime. What the client realized is as they have become more reliant on the cloud, they too have become more reliant on the internet and the cost of downtime was simply too great. Multiple, diverse connections and SD-WAN give them the reliability they needed to support their business today and prepare them for growth. We created a solution to a problem they were having.

Bottom line, SD-WAN is relevant. SD-WAN is not going away. If you aren't out having the SD-WAN conversation with your clients, I can assure you that your competitor is. Differentiate yourself from the competition and start the dialogue today. If you can find the right partner, you do not need to be the subject matter expert to provide the solution.