Until now, Teridion has sold an Internet acceleration service to SaaS providers, and sold it mainly direct, but now they are launching a Cloud-based WAN service that will go entirely through partners, and has created a new channel program to support them.
San Francisco-based Teridion is a startup which has established a profitable niche in the SaaS acceleration market, providing a service to SaaS providers that optimizes the Internet in much the same way as WAN optimization improves networks. Now, however, they are pivoting into a new market, while leveraging their core technology to do so. They are launching Teridion for Enterprise, a cloud-based WAN solution that provides the SLA-backed performance and reliability of MPLS, but with the agility, elastic scale, and global reach of the public cloud. They have also launched a new channel program to support the initiative.
“We were founded in 2013, and have kept a low profile, but we do have a stable of marquee customers,” said Pej Roshan Teridion’s VP of Products and Marketing. “We have sold an internet acceleration service to Saas providers. With our current offering we are adjacent to companies like Cloudflare because we provide very specific, bidirectional personalized content. We are more oriented towards a SaaS provider, in highly dynamic situations, particularly where you transfer information, like with Box. Our biggest competition is internal IT within a SaaS company doing it on their own.”
Teridion for Enterprise brings them into a completely different market.
“It is a turnkey WAN service for enterprises based on SD-WAN but delivered as a service and based on the public cloud,” Roshan said. “With this offering, a company like Aryaka is likely to be a competitor. But it’s different from a service like Aryaka offers because they have a private network, but ours runs entirely on the public cloud. It lets us build something that’s global, fast and easy, and we have a comparable SLA.” It will run atop over 25 leading public cloud providers.
Using the public Internet against a secure private network isn’t usually something a company touts as a competitive advantage, but the key ingredient here is Teridion’s core business of optimizing the Internet.
“The big invention here is Teridion Curated Routing, which utilizes deep learning,” Roshan stated. “In all these cloud data centres, we have monitoring agents that learn the performance characteristics of the Internet, and send the data to a deep learning management system in the cloud. It then uses the data to deploy the WAN in a way that the enterprise avoids areas of latency.” It thus provides superior SaaS application performance, efficiency both across multiple cloud providers and for site to site performance, and on-demand scalability.
“The use cases include MPLS replacement because of the cost savings, improved SaaS performance, site to site performance, and access to cloud workloads,” Roshan said.
Morgan Closson, Teridion’s VP of Global Sales
“We feel it’s an opportunity for partners to really steal the lunch of MPLS, which is legacy, not scalable, and takes a long time to deploy,” said Morgan Closson, Teridion’s VP of Global Sales. “We think that the street price will be $50 per site – half of the list price – which will be attractive.”
Teridion has used some partners in their core business, typically large integrators, but they are not a major part of the go-to-market.
“The SaaS optimization go-to-market has been hybrid, but predominantly direct, because it’s fairly niche, and SaaS providers are less likely to buy through a partner,” Closson said. “The new product is applicable for the entire SD WAN space, so is ideal for the channel. We are entering a market that’s much more channel-focused, where there is a robust channel in SD-WAN.”
As a result, Teridion for Enterprise will be a channel-only offering.
“We will drive all business through the channel,” Closson said. “Teridion for Enterprise is designed to be channel-friendly, as well as highly effective and reliable.”
At the launch, Teridion has enlisted a roster of SD-WAN vendor partners.
“We are going to market with a who’s-who of SD WAN vendors – Cisco Meraki, Citrix, Velocloud, and Silver Peak,” Closson said. Teridion for Enterprise is designed to be complementary to SD-WAN deployments, and can snap-in to SD-WAN implementations from all major vendors. The expectation is that resellers will position Teridion for Enterprise as a complement to their core SD-WAN offering, that delivers fast and reliable cloud and site-to-site access.
The channel partners are being supported with a new channel program.
“We have created an entirely new service offering just for enterprises that requires an entirely new channel program,” Roshan said. “Our channel program around SaaS is ad hoc with some global integrators, but our enterprise program is brand new.” It provides the kind of stakes channel partners expect, such as deal registration, lead sharing, training programs, and marketing funds for qualified participants.
“We are building value-based partnerships with a select number of partners as we grow, but we would like to have eventually a high number of partners in a value driven model,” Closson said.
The service and channel program formally launch today, with full general availability slated for Q1 of 2019.
