UTM cloud provider MyDigitalShield just introduced a complementary SD-WAN-as-a-service offering, and are finding most MSPs know little about SD-WAN despite its potential for their businesses.
Andrew Bagrin, founder and CEO of MyDigitalShield
AUSTIN – Three years ago, MyDigitalShield launched an SMB-focused cloud service with enterprise grade-security priced for that market. OmniShield, their perimeter Unified Threat Management solution, virtualizes the customer’s perimeter in order to protect all their sites. They just enhanced their portfolio with OmniWAN, software-defined WAN-as-a-service, which complements OmniShield by turning DSL and cable internet connections into enterprise-grade MPLS – without the enterprise price. OmniWAN is an offering that the MSP channel should jump at – except that most of them don’t have any idea what SD-WAN is. And so MyDigitalShield was at the CompTIA ChannelCon event this week to spread the word.
“In the telco world, SD-WAN has been a popular buzzword for a while,” said Andrew Bagrin, founder and CEO of MyDigitalShield. “In contrast, we have found that 9 of 10 MSPs have not even heard of SD-WAN.” Very few MSPs are involved with MPLS either.
While the channel as a whole tends to be very familiar with SD-WAN, most of them know it as a product, not as a service. Moreover, most of the players who do offer it as a service, sell direct.
“SD-WAN as a service has mainly been in the telco space,” Bagrin said. “We have just been focused on services, not product. We also started with security and moved to SD-WAN, when it’s usually the reverse.
Starting in security has its advantages, Bagrin said.
“Many companies today don’t use SIP trunking,” he said. “That includes us. We don’t use SIP. We use Skype and Go To Meeting. That means Web Protocols, and putting them in the proper classes for SD-WAN, and that’s usually a big issue. But our UTM already identifies 6000 applications, so we can easily split apps out and put them in the proper classes. Nobody else does that, and the impact of that has been amazing.”
MyDigitalShield is also emphasizing that they are the only company that can offer joint security-SD-WAN services developed by the same team.
Leonard Dimiceli, MyDigitalShield’s VP of Channel Sales
“We are the only vendor with the security and SD-WAN services, built by us, and built and designed for the MSP channel,” said Leonard Dimiceli, MyDigitalShield’s VP of Channel Sales. “We provide the MSP with one throat to choke.
The idea with the joint solution is that while both the UTM and SD-WAN are effective separately, together they are highly complementary, providing low cost, high quality networking at lower costs, but with baked in high-end security.
“For MSPs, the UTM is the anchor and the WAN is on top of that, and for the telco agents, it’s the reverse,” Dimiceli said.
Still, getting MSPs to grasp the utility of SD-WAN to their business remains a challenge.
“There are two channels, with MSPs being the majority, and then you have the telco agents, and we see a fair amount of the telco against here now at ChannelCon too,” Bagrin said.
“The convergence of these two channels is taking longer than we thought,” Dimiceli said. That delay contributes to a lack of MSP awareness of SD-WAN.
“If we have a 20-minute conversation with an MSP who doesn’t get it, the light will usually go on,” Bagrin said. “It’s getting enough people to sit down and listen for that long that’s the challenge, but it’s necessary to get around the lack of understanding of SD-WAN.”
Dimiceli said that at the recent Robin Robins show, they had lineups at their booth.
“At that show, they document the impact of presentations, and 95 per cent said they were more likely to buy after the presentation,” he added.
Bagrin indicated that the company’s UTM business has been expanding significantly.
“We have tripled the amount of partners, and doubled the revenue per partner,” he said.
