Verizon Business Adds Silver Peak to SD-WAN Roster
Carrier will offer the HPE company’s Unity EdgeConnect platform as a managed service
Verizon Business is adding Silver Peak to its lineup of software defined-WAN (SD-WAN) vendors, joining Cisco Systems and Versa Networks.
The Lowdown: Verizon Business will now offer Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect edge platform as a managed service.
The Details: The addition of Silver Peak this month comes about five months after the company was bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $925 million to bolster is capabilities in the fast-growing areas of SD-WAN and the edge. Silver Peak is now part of Aruba Networks, an HPE company that initially focused on wireless connectivity for branch operations and remote workers and has since become the larger vendor’s primary networking unit.
Unity EdgeConnect is a unified SD-WAN platform that includes appliances and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based controllers. It offers a range of capabilities, including automatic routing workloads to the most appropriate network resource, ensuring application performance and availability, and leveraging machine learning for real-time network monitoring.
It includes Unity Orchestrator to drive security and quality of service to thousands of sites and service chaining to third-party networks and security services and Unity Boost to reduce the latency for applications and the transmission of repetitive data.
The Impact: SD-WAN is a key component in networks at a time when businesses have become more distributed, embracing the cloud and edge environments and applications and data can be created and accessed outside of central data centers. SD-WAN is a cost-efficient option for ensuring connectivity to any transport mode. Carriers are looking to be able to offer SD-WAN capabilities as a managed service to their business clients. A report from MarketsandMarkets said the global SD-WAN market will grow from $1.9 billion this year to $8.4 billion by 2025, an annual average increase of 34.5%.
Background: Verizon Business has been offering SD-WAN capabilities for five years, when it first partnered with Cisco for its home-grown IWAN product and, later, Viptela, an SD-WAN pure-play company that Cisco bought in 2017 for $610 million. That same year, the carrier began partnering with Versa Networks.
The Buzz: “There’s a transformative shift in the way that enterprises are looking to manage their WAN edge architecture, particularly in the context of today’s business climate,” said Aamir Hussain, senior vice president of business products at Verizon Business. “Legacy networks simply can’t keep up with the requirements of today’s cloud-first enterprises and the addition of the Silver Peak EdgeConnect platform to Verizon’s SD-WAN portfolio is yet another achievement in driving value to businesses looking for rapid deployment of SD-WAN and WAN Optimization experiences.”
“As enterprises continue to advance digital transformation initiatives, many are realizing that an intelligent WAN architecture is critical to achieving maximum value from existing and ongoing cloud investments,” said David Hughes, founder of Silver Peak and senior vice president of the WAN business at Aruba. “Enterprises can benefit from Verizon’s industry-leading managed services practice that now includes the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform.”
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CHANNELNOMICS:
>HPE to Boost SD-WAN Expertise With Silver Peak Acquisition
>Silver Peak Launches Deployment Partner Program
