Silver Peak also announces the hire of a team of executives to build up the service provide business, which will be expanded with other partnerships.
John Vincenzo, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Silver Peak
Today, Silver Peak is announcing multiple moves designed to build up a managed SD-WAN business. First, the company is announcing a partnership agreement with Masergy to deliver a new managed SD-WAN service, based on Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect and Unity Boost. This will be followed by other partnerships. Secondly, Silver Peak announced the hire of four new senior executives, specifically to execute its service provider go-to-market strategy.
“We see the service provider market as a very large opportunity for us, which will be significantly larger in a year than it is now,” said John Vincenzo, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Silver Peak. “As a company. our early focus was selling to enterprises through channel. That business continues to grow, although some of those partners are also moving into the MSP market.”
Dallas-based Masergy, which offers a broad range of hybrid network solutions from a very large software-defined platform, was looking to add an SD-WAN offering to their roster.
“Masergy is a forward-thinking service provider, who knew that they could add value on top of SD-WAN to customers if they pick the right solution,” Vincenzo said. “They went through an exhaustive evaluation process and chose Silver Peak. The companies say that Silver Peak’s zero touch provisioning, centralized orchestration, Dynamic Path Control features, and Unity Boost for WAN optimization, all in a single integrated solution, was why they were chosen.
Silver Peak, also announced that it had assembled a team of four new executive leaders to execute its service provider go-to-market strategy. In addition to the Masergy partnership, Silver Peak will be announcing an EMEA-based one, with UK-based telco Interoute, which operates the largest cloud services platform in Europe.
“Interoute is in Europe, but is very similar to Masergy in that they have determined SD-WAN is another service they can provide,” Vincenzo said. “These companies have had to consider whether SD-WAN is friend or foe to them, but the forward-thinking ones realize that if they don’t offer it to their customers, somebody else will. Service providers feared that SD-WAN would cannibalize their MPLS business, but they have found that most enterprises use MPLS with broadband as a backup. Service providers are starting to realize SD WAN opens up new opportunities for them.” Interoute has also partnered with Silver Peak in traditional WAN optimization for years.
“This and Masergy are our first two service provider partnerships,” Vincenzo said. “There are others in the queue which can’t be named at this time.”
The new executive appointments are: Shayne Stubbs, vice president, global service provider sales, who is rejoining Silver Peak after a couple of stints elsewhere; Nav Chander, senior director, service provider marketing, who was hired from as IDC, where he had been research manager for enterprise, telecommunications and networking; Bob Rodio, Vice President, Chief Technologist for Service Providers, who will be the technical lead on building the Silver Peak service provider business; and Maurice Abécassis, director, EMEA service provider sales.
“We needed to build out our term to build a business around service providers because it is becoming such a big part of our go-to-market,” Vincenzo said.
The new service provider leadership team will focus on accelerating market penetration and empowering service providers to bring new managed SD-WAN services to market quickly to expand and grow their customer base and identify new revenue streams.
For the time being, traditional Silver Peak partners building a managed service practice will be managed through Silver Peak’s existing partner program, rather than as a service provider, but Vincenzo said that could change.
“We will keep an eye on them and their volume,” he said.
