Ipanema, which Infovista acquired in 2015, is becoming an increasingly important part of their business, and the MSP channel is becoming a more important part of that, as Ipanema broadens out its channel strategy beyond large telco partners.

Infovista has added new cloud-native orchestration capabilities to their Ipanema SD-WAN, deepening its application visibility, adding a cloud-based orchestrator, and introducing a new dynamic cloud application database which will support many times the number of third-party SaaS applications as it did before.

“Infovista has always been focused on application performance,” said Ricardo Belmar, Infovista’s Senior Director of Global Enterprise Marketing. “With today’s announcement, we are enhancing the Nextgen Application Intelligence+ of our Ipanema SD-WAN, to provide deeper application visibility and improve control mechanisms to deliver better performance.

Infovista is French in origin, with its roots being in network performance management. They moved into the SD-WAN space in 2015 with the acquisition of Ipanema, and it is now one of the three core areas of the company.

“Since we acquired Ipanema we have pivoted into SD-WAN like almost everyone else in our space,” Belmar said. “The unique thing with Ipanema is how it looks at the performance of applications on the network. Others look at the link layer in the network.  Ipanema has always looked at how applications on the network actually perform. It’s a non-agent based approach which focused on improving the user experience of all the applications on the network. A lot of SD-WAN vendors say they improve application performance, but it’s a by-product. Here, it’s a focus.” Ipanema maintains application quality of experience by using machine learning techniques to distinguish between the applications and their flows at the user session-level, and to dynamically associate and enforce business policies.

The company has 450 customers globally.

“It’s a combination of a lot of very large customers with 1000 sites balanced out by some 50 site ones,” Belmar said. “Our Go-to-Market strategy has focused on large enterprises, but we are 100 per cent channel, so that’s why we have smaller customers too.” Westcon/Synnex handles their distribution.

The majority of their channel, historically, has been larger telcos.

“Those have been our traditional partners because of our large global enterprise focus, but we are now moving more downmarket, to address the mid-size enterprise – the 1000-5000 seat market. So we have been increasing our focus on MSPs, adding regional partners like SoTel in the U.S. MSPs are growing in importance, and they benefit from the fact that our solution is multi-tenanted and designed to scale.”

Belmar said that the enhancements to Ipanema are focused on making it more attractive in the market.

“We really think this allows the product to go into that midmarket enterprise segment, and will assist building out our MSP channel,” he said.

Ipanema now has a cloud-based orchestrator, which will be particularly attractive to this kind of partner.

“Before, our orchestration was an on-prem Web app, but now it is fully migrated to the cloud,” Belmar stated. “Some partners had offered this in the cloud before, but now we do it natively, so no one needs to stand up any infrastructure.”

Ipanema also now has a dynamic cloud application database.

“That is new,” Belmar said. “Before, we had an internal database updated by software maintenance releases, rather than the cloud. Before we used to support a few hundred SaaS applications the old way. Now we can support 4000 SaaS applications.”

Enhanced visibility now allows Ipanema to prioritize and rank all applications.

“We have seen great utilization rates of bandwidth, so we can now get 95 per cent without having to worry about congestion or packet loss.” Belmar indicated. “We also have new routing and path selection capabilities, with one single device gives all application intelligence. It’s much more all-inclusive.”

Belmar said that the enhanced solution complements multiple channel initiatives on several fronts.

“We have been adding new people from an organizational perspective to talk to these partners,” he said. “Last year we brought in Jon Howes to lead the channel and structure the channel support organization on an all-channel model. We added channel account managers in the regions. New partner portals are also being introduced and a new marketing portal, so partners can run an out-of-the-box campaign.”