Viptela, whose SD-WAN platform is differentiated by a centrally controlled overlay network that simplifies policy changes, cuts costs, and provides more flexible access to cloud connections, expands its go-to-market by being integrated in the SevOne platform. They also indicated that more such partnerships are coming.

San Jose-based software-defined networking vendor Viptela has announced a new strategic partnership with digital infrastructure management vendor SevOne. It provides a validated and highly scalable solution to monitor Software Defined-Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs), in which Viptela is integrated within SevOne’s platform, while still being completely visible within it.

Founded in 2012, Viptela differentiates itself from other SD-WAN providers through its creation of a centrally controlled overlay network that greatly cuts the time required to make policy changes, slashes the cost of WAN administration, and provides more flexible and less expensive options to access cloud content.

“Our founders wanted to do something in the software-defined networking space, and the focus was all on the data centre then,” said Lloyd Noronha, Viptela’s Director of Marketing. “However, they got Fortune 500 companies to advise us on their networking problems, and they stressed that the main problem was the WAN, which took between 6 and 18 months to change policies, and which was seeing a major increase in its traffic, especially at a time when the benefits of virtualization hadn’t come to networking at all.

“The three problems we focus on in the WAN are the cost, the fact that it has taken a long time to make policy changes, and the fact that the network has not been ready for cloud,” Noronha added. “We make our overlay network work over any link a network has – any combination or any number of them. That drops the average cost by more than half.”

Noronha said that SD-WAN policy changes typically took between 6 and 18 months to accomplish, because the changes had to be made on each device, and in each network running in the data centre.

“We make all these problems go away with centralized management for all networks so they become one, with a single overlay,” he said.

Noronha also emphasized that Viptela’s SEN (Secure Extensible Network) platform is better suited for the cloud world because it is designed to be more flexible in the way it sets up connections. Both private and public IP connections like MPLS, wireless LTE/4G, broadband and Ethernet can be set up to meet application requirements based on geographic location, bandwidth and whether they are based in the branch office, campus, data centre or cloud.

“Most traffic today is designed to go to the data centre,” he said. “However, we create an agile construct to access cloud content, which allows connections to be set up to get the content from the closest local servers, rather than go back to the data centre and from there up to the cloud. That’s because we can extend the WAN securely to any link which has a pipe.”

While Viptela has customers with as few as five sites in their deployments, Noronha said that their sweet spot is in midsized to larger enterprises.

“Two of the largest customers we have are a Fortune 500 retailer, with about 1500 sites and a northeastern bank with about 3000 sites, where we replaced the incumbent routing solution,” he stated. Last month Viptela also expanded their relationship with Verizon to enable Verizon to provide Viptela’s SD-WAN as a hosted service, adding to an earlier, similar agreement with Singtel.

“These large carriers are a key part of our go-to-market, because many enterprises use carriers to provide this kind of capability as a managed service,” Noronha said. “We also sell direct, through managed service providers, and through resellers and integrators.”

SevOne becomes another key route to market for Viptela. Their SD-WAN platform has been fully integrated with the SevOne Digital Infrastructure Management Platform, to allow admins to view status information from the Viptela network within the SevOne dashboard.

“We found as we were deploying, that SevOne was already there in some of our larger accounts,” Noronha said. “Now we are fully integrated into SevOne, but completely visible within it. It is a complete and validated design.”

Noronha also indicated that more such partnerships for Viptela are on the horizon.

“We will have others,” he said. “We are working on them actively now.”