The State of the Industry

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Welcome to the New Year! As the new CEO of Ecessa I wanted to introduce myself. I joined Ecessa in 2014 serving as Vice President of Development and Support where I focused much of my time on software development and feature innovation. Subsequently, I became Chief Technology Officer, expanding on that technical role and helping to focus our position in the expanding Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) marketplace. Prior to Ecessa, I held various leadership roles at technology companies in different industries. I’m thrilled to step up to the CEO role at Ecessa, continuing to drive our growth in this exciting space and helping customers adopt this disruptive technology.

2017, What a Ride! Here Are a Few Observations from Last Year

SD-WAN adoption increased. According to Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President at Gartner,

“While many networking technologies are over-hyped as the next big thing, SD-WAN is delivering on the promise. In just three short years, adoption has taken off and we now estimate 6,000+ paying SD-WAN customers with more than 4,000 production implementations. We recommend you look at SD-WAN when refreshing WAN edge equipment, renegotiating a carrier contract, building out new branches, or aggressively moving apps to the cloud…”

We noted an increase in companies asking us for the technology in alignment with this trend. Clients who have relied on us for traditional failover are now asking us for SD-WAN solutions. It is moving from a research topic in your IT department to a valuable tool for any business.

Acquisitions came into play. Viptela was acquired by Cisco, and VeloCloud by Dell VMware, proving the credibility and value of SD-WAN technology by industry leaders. The potential drawback for their users? Big company overhead and a loss of specialized service and support. Unfortunately, with any large merger or acquisition, customers are typically left waiting on hold for technical support and special pricing is no longer honored.

More vendors are offering this technology through multiple channels. More sales went through telecom resellers and managed service providers (MSPs) as their customers became aware of the benefits of SD-WAN. With more IT professionals educated on the technology, channel partners are finding it easier to specify and implement SD-WAN solutions. The good news is SD-WAN is now more available through your trusted network advisors and suppliers.

PoCs ruled. Proof of Concept installations were the all the rage throughout the industry, as customers skeptical about the technology demanded demonstrations and test deployments to show features and stability. Ecessa won client trust with SD-WAN solutions by supporting a methodical approach to installations, having an architecture that integrates into any network and by being “carrier agnostic”. 2017 proved the technology is reliable and delivers on its promises.

2018, Let’s Get Serious. Here’s What Clients Will Expect This Year

Show me the value! We know SD-WAN works. It’s been proven through thousands of deployments. Demand for Proof of Concept will evolve to Proof of Value. The question is shifting from “Does it work?” to, “Does it provide enough value for us right now? And if not now, when?” It’s only a matter of time. We built Ecessa’s Never Down™ solutions to meet the value challenge with scalable pricing, bandwidth, remote monitoring, support, and more.

Hit my budget. To provide value, pricing will need to be right-sized to accommodate specific needs. We expect vendors in the SD-WAN market to lower pricing and offer more targeted solutions. Ecessa already accommodates this with our good-better-best product offerings through Ecessa Edge , PowerLink™ and WANworX™.

Bring the bandwidth. Enterprises want to know how to get more bandwidth with fewer bucks by looking at fiber, cellular, satellite, or whatever’s available to them. A powerful feature of SD-WAN is its flexibility to bring together disparate, affordable services, seamlessly and securely. Businesses can achieve phenomenal increases in bandwidth on limited budgets by using any bandwidth of any type, from any provider.

Monitor it for me. Forget DIY, customers want more automated services and support from vendors to watch over their environment. As IT departments face more projects of higher priority, like security, keeping the network up and running is an unnecessary burden they would like to – and should be able to – offload.  

Ecessa is taking proactive measures to meet these expectations. For example, read about our new monitoring and response service, Insight+. We look forward to serving your networking needs in 2018 and beyond.

Happy Networking,

Mike Siegler, Ecessa CEO

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