It’s the age of digitalization. As the steady march into the cloud continues, businesses everywhere are searching for ways to boost network capacity without increasing cost. In response to this demand, SD-WAN has emerged as a compelling solution, offering enhanced connectivity with increased control and flexibility.
Yet although the adoption of SD-WAN has grown steadily in recent years, several barriers are keeping it from reaching mass-market adoption. The number of technical, commercial, and strategic challenges that come with SD-WAN have simply been too great to create a compelling business case for the SME and enterprise market. Until now.
SD-WAN: What’s happened so far?
SD-WAN’s appeal lies in its ability to enable enterprises to acquire greater network control by defining and overlaying new, flexible architectures without compromising the underlying network.
Yet despite the technology’s considerable traction and clear benefits, it has yet to break into the mass-market and adoption around the world has been inconsistent. In the US, where businesses have actually championed a managed or co-managed services approach, the technology has established a decent footprint, but in APAC and European markets the ROI has - so far - been harder to justify, with legacy MPLS access services more established and cheaper.
This lack of wider adoption can also be explained by the complex and crowded SD-WAN vendor landscape. Competing players, disjointed strategies and an overwhelming number of options, the market thus far has mainly comprised of expensive off-the-shelf solutions from dominant vendors. As such, justifying investment in the technology has been a hard-sell to the SME and enterprise market.
To enable broader adoption of SD-WAN, a new approach is needed. Let’s look at some of the key factors that are holding up mass-adoption and the way service providers can pave the way for a more accessible SD-WAN solution.
Staying flexible
Many available options currently on the market rely on installing an expensive, dedicated SD-WAN appliance from a major vendor. As these options rarely offer the full range of connectivity and routing options, customers are often forced to either keep and run their traditional routers in parallel or abandon part of their unsupported legacy systems.
This either/or approach has made it difficult for small and medium-sized players to create the business case that would allow them to also adopt a DIY approach. One of the key factors to broader SD-WAN adoption, then, is offering an easily programmable, scalable and adjustable SD-WAN solution that allows businesses to use the technology in line with their (and their clients) unique connectivity needs.
Looking forward while supporting legacy
Service providers and their customers all have different needs, so the “one-size-fits-all” solution clearly isn’t viable. Instead, new approaches to SD-WAN are enabling service providers to pivot their focus on enhancing existing access infrastructure to deliver tailored SD-WAN as a virtualized service via a one-box solution that also caters to the businesses’ other connectivity requirements.
Not only does this offer service providers and their customers more flexibility, it also opens the door for capacity projections, which allows customers to stop buying by-default from the big brands and paying for more than is required.
At the same time, integrating SD-WAN into the core portfolio of carrier-grade legacy services allows end-customers to rely on their existing solutions while ‘switching on’ additional capacity, automation, and application management as and when needed. Offering SD-WAN as a flexible solution that supports legacy technology allows service providers to reach customers for whom the technology was previously out of reach.
Going the extra mile
Taking a simplified, consolidated approach to SD-WAN makes a lot of sense when considered in the broader enterprise and SME context. These customers are already dealing with often disruptive legacy system migration, so justifying a complex and expensive multi-vendor SD-WAN approach is challenging. Fundamentally, many lack the in-house IT skills and resources needed to deliver a solution themselves.
Implementing network upgrades to a ‘live’ infrastructure is always challenging and most enterprises are reluctant to shoulder the responsibility or to sacrifice their legacy services, or both. Rather than getting rid of MPLS altogether, enterprises want greater agility and control over their application traffic management and cloud access.
A managed SD-WAN solution takes the pressure off. It removes the need for the customer to get to grips with new systems and technologies. Service providers, therefore, have an opportunity to play this crucial role, not only by offering enterprises a more flexible SD-WAN solution, but also by taking on the network management. This, of course, then leads to new revenues and greater customer loyalty.
The next-generation SD-WAN solution
As the first wave of SD-WAN excitement abates, the market is now starting to mature. The key for service providers is to create a win-win situation. Those that can strike the balance between offering SMEs and enterprises a robust, secure managed service that avoids network disruption and eases deployment complexity, while enabling them to define their own application prioritization and performance objectives, will unlock this new market segment for the long term.
This strategic approach to SD-WAN, as part of a healthy evolution of existing networks rather than a disruptive revolution, is possible thanks to the next generation of SD-WAN technology. Simplified SD-WAN deployment, achieved through a single-box, multi-service approach is at the heart of this new model. Combining SD-WAN and a universal CPE with a whole host of additional VNFs is, so far, an underserved model that benefits both the service provider portfolio and its end customers. Taking early ownership of this space will enable service providers not only to position themselves that the bleeding edge, but also to unlock new revenues and demonstrate a genuine understanding of their customers’ challenges.
