The best-of-breed partnership is aimed at enterprises with a global presence, as well as regional customers with significant challenges.
Gary Sevounts, Aryaka’s Chief Marketing Officer
SD-WAN provider Aryaka Networks has announced a new partnership with 8×8, which sells a portfolio of enterprise-grade voice, contact centre and collaboration cloud solutions. It will see Aryaka’s global SD-WAN solution combined with 8×8’s Communications Cloud, with its superior voice and video quality. While the two companies will collaborate on selling it, the solution will not be integrated as a single SKU. Instead it will be a ‘meet in the channel’ opportunity for the partners of both companies.
“This is our first joint collaboration with a UCaaS [United Communications-as-a-Service] provider,” ,” said Gary Sevounts, Aryaka’s Chief Marketing Officer. “The agreement came about through our joint customers, who said that it would make sense for us to partner. 8×8 provides high quality cloud communications, and are consistently recognized by Gartner as a leader in the space. Their customers come to them for quality and reliability”
Aryaka, which has been in business for eight years, differentiates itself by its global private network with 28 points of presence around the world.
“We are really the only global SD-WAN provider,” Sevounts stated. “All the others are regional. We can overcome the limitations of MPLS and the Internet because each of our points of presence has a stack of software-defined networking applications, delivered from our POPs as a service. Our global private network is designed for enterprise-grade connectivity for cloud as well as on-premise applications.”
That capability makes Aryaka a strong play in large global enterprises who need a solution that can span the globe effectively.
“We have over 600 large enterprise customers,” Sevounts said. “98 per cent of these are global, and almost none are regional. That’s our sweet spot – global enterprises, for whom neither legacy MPLS not regional SD WANs solve their problems.”
While 8×8 has a broader range of customers, they also serve global enterprises, and Sevounts said that since both companies emphasize the quality of their offerings, they tend to attract some of the same customers for their complementary solutions.
“We have a significant number of customers who have deployed both,” he said.
Through the partnership, Aryaka’s global SD-WAN will provide enterprise-grade private connectivity to further enhance the reliable communications experience for 8×8 Virtual Office and 8×8 Virtual Contact Center when both solutions are deployed together. Enterprise voice and video traffic will be routed through Aryaka’s global private network instead of over the public Internet, thereby minimizing latencies, packet loss and jitter.
Both 8×8 and Aryaka have hybrid channel models, with increased emphasis on partners in their go to market, and two-thirds or more of their revenues coming through them. 8×8 signed its first North American distribution deals this year, with Jenne and in July, Ingram Micro.
“We have a hybrid model, and are a very channel-friendly company, which partners with resellers, agents and in some cases service providers,” Sevounts said. “Between 60 and 70 per cent of our sales are channel-driven.”
Both Aryaka and 8×8 will be doing aggressive joint selling of the new offering, but they won’t be bundling the solution as an integrated SKU.
“We will be working very closely together, and will bring each other into deals,” Sevounts said. “It will be very much a ‘meet in the channel’ approach.”
Both companies are also emphasizing that the relationship is ideal for partners.
“If a channel partner deals with an enterprise looking for global deployments – even some regional customers where they have challenges – that is an ideal situation where they can work with us,” Sevounts said. “They will get by far the best solution in terms of clarity of voice and lack of dropped calls.”
