The new Toronto POP will let Aryaka serve more Canadian customers more efficiently, while the presence of Craig Workman running their Canadian sales lets Aryaka expand their activity around business development, marketing, education and thought leadership.
Gary Sevounts, Aryaka’s Chief Marketing Officer
Global SD-WAN provider Aryaka has undertaken a pair of initiatives to boost their presence in the Canadian market. First, they have established a new Point of Presence [POP] in Toronto, the 30th POP in their global network. Secondly, they have formally announced that Craig Workman has become what amounts to Aryaka’s first country manager in Canada, with the job title of Director of Business Development, Canada.
Aryaka markets itself as the only true global SD-WAN provider, because their global POP network allows them to overcome the limitations of MPLS and the Internet to provide enterprise-grade SD-WAN-as-a-Service here for both cloud and on-prem applications.
“The presence of these software-defined POPs means that one is located within 30ms of 95 per cent of all business users,” said Gary Sevounts, Aryaka’s Chief Marketing Officer. “That network is already so comprehensive that our goal isn’t to expand the global coverage for speed. We achieved that 95 per cent number two to three years back and have been maintaining it since. However, we are adding a new POP in Toronto because we are seeing large growth in Canada. Adding the new POP will let us service even more customers, and with improved performance.”
This ability to connect to U.S. based POPs meant that Aryaka was able to build up a good business here without a POP, particularly among Canadian branches of large international enterprises, as those companies are an important part of Aryaka’s customer base. Moreover, the fact that the POP isn’t a cloud – just a simple onramp so the customer doesn’t have to manage anything – means that the lack of a Canadian POP didn’t cause any data sovereignty issues, since the data never left the country.
“Aryaka doesn’t change where the data goes,” Sevounts said. “It’s the underlying network underneath the POPs that matters. The extra POP just makes it a little faster and more efficient.”
About 70 per cent of Aryaka’s business goes through channel partners.
“We have a big ecosystem of master service agents along the telco model in Canada, and also around 15 resellers, and MSPs,” Sevounts said. “There are over 100 partners overall in Canada.”
Craig Workman joined Aryaka as Director of Business Development in March of this year, although his appointment is only being formally announced now. He has worked in the IT business since 1990, mainly in sales roles with vendors, although from 2010 to early 2013, he also worked for a VAR, as Ottawa District General Manager for Scalar Decisions. From early 2013 until recently he was at network visibility and security vendor Gigamon, first as a Regional Sales Director in Canada, and then from July 2016, as their country manager in Canada.
While both the new POP and the new country manager strengthen Aryaka in Canada, the strategy remains unchanged. The difference is that they now have more resources to execute it.
“The strategy will remain the same,” Sevounts said. “We will continue to expand our presence in Canada, but we will now be able to scale it. We will increase our marketing activity in Canada. Having a country manager and Canadian office will let us do more business development and more marketing. It will also let us provide more education and more thought leadership.”
