Case Study | Summit Partners

The Company

Summit Partners is a global growth equity investment firm that is focused on partnering with growth stage companies in the technology, healthcare, business and financial services and consumer sectors, among others. Notable companies backed by Summit include AVAST® Software, E-TEK Dynamics, Hittite Microwave Corporation, Fleetcor Technologies® and Wildfire Interactive.

Confidential information regarding time-sensitive, high value transactions fill Summit email inboxes, meetings, phone calls and video conferences. To fund companies that are helping redefine their industries, Summit needs a highly secure, extremely reliable network.

“We do video conferences all the time. Some last an entire day. We have three offices and the companies in which we invest have offices all over the world,” said Vic Zelny, CIO of Summit Partners. “Our mission is to ‘make technology invisible,’ and to facilitate successful meetings and business interactions—tech lets the business people focus on their job and what’s important to them.”

The Challenge

Having a reliable network is about more than just connectivity. It’s about productivity. It’s about keeping employees happy and focused on performing at their best.

“When the network goes down, productivity plummets. We wanted to eliminate that as a pain point,” said Zelny. Even if the network comes back up a few minutes later, productivity takes a hit.

Summit had two network upgrade goals:

• Make network failures transparent to employees.
• Lessen the technological learning curve so a junior person could diagnose the network and take action when necessary.

After trying a solution that only met part of its needs, Summit turned to Ecessa.

The Solution

Summit Partners piloted Ecessa’s SD-WAN solution with two WANworX® units to support network data resiliency, VoIP, and video conferencing.

“We have a complex WAN environment with real-time VoIP and video protocols being key to our business. Ecessa [WANworX] is smart enough to reroute the traffic without impacting the in-progress conversation. So, even if the primary link fails, the remote Ecessa device has the packets in the right place. At one point during the test we ran into an issue with VoIP traffic, but the Ecessa support engineers were able to diagnose the problem and deliver us a software fix to make it work within a few days. That type of support is rare in the industry.”

Zelny has found Ecessa’s support to be the most helpful. “One of the problems that I find in dealing with vendors and cloud initiatives, and even networking technology platforms is the tech support just isn’t where you’d like it to be. The result? The problem ends up in your lap.”

Zelny appreciates the ownership Ecessa takes. “With Ecessa they never play a game of ‘that’s your problem.’”

The Results

Summit Partners experienced 98% packet loss improvement and avoided nine outages during their two-week evaluation. After repeating successful test runs Summit ordered WANworX units for their other offices. Summit Partners’ network is not only set up for success today, but for the future as well.

“The biggest problem Ecessa solves is the next problem – before we have it.” Technology at Summit Partners just works. That means there are no productivity delays, and the Summit team can focus on doing what they do best: supporting the entrepreneurs and companies in whom they invest.