The meet-in-the-channel partnership will see Cisco Meraki resellers sell the offering, as well as the growing number of partners who are Teridion’s sole route to market for the service.
Pejman Roshan, Teridion’s VP of Products and Marketing
San Francisco-headquartered Teridion has announced an integration of their Teridion for Enterprise service with Cisco Meraki MX Security and SD-WAN appliances. The cloud-managed joint solution brings carrier grade Internet and WAN performance to broadband at a fraction of the cost, and will be sold entirely through channel partners.
Teridion is a 2013 startup with roots in Israel. They originally began in the SaaS acceleration market, and then last year leveraged that technology to announce their expansion into the WAN market, with a turnkey WAN service for enterprises based on SD-WAN, but delivered as a service and based on the public cloud. That service, Teridion for Enterprise, reaches general availability now, and the Cisco Meraki integration is a key point of its go-to-market strategy.
“Customers assume that the Internet will just work, but it is a hodgepodge of networks and routes that aren’t always those best performing, but are used because they are what’s available,” said Pejman Roshan, Teridion’s VP of Products and Marketing. “This stands in the way of good cloud performance. We fix this mess, with an overlay on top of the Internet.”
Teridion’s secret sauce here, developed in their initial SaaS acceleration business, is something called Teridion Curated Routing, which utilizes deep learning. Their monitoring agents in cloud data centres learn the performance characteristics of the Internet, and send the data to a deep learning management system in the cloud, which uses that data to deploy the WAN to avoid areas of latency. That can improve Internet performance anywhere between 2x and 20x.
“The service first launched last November, and we are now announcing its general availability,” Roshan said. “The deep integration with Meraki natively integrates with our high performing WAN, to make the Internet operate more like a LAN.” The integration adds Cisco Meraki’s AutoVPN routing, enterprise-grade security, high availability capabilities and centralized cloud management to Teridion’s core strengths.
Teridition’s original SaaS acceleration business had a hybrid go-to-market model, but was largely direct, with a few integrator partners in the mix. In contrast, Teridion for Enterprise was designed from the outset with a 100 per cent channel model, to take advantage of the broad channel presence in SD-WAN, and it came out of the gate with a channel program designed to support the business. They now have several dozen channel partners to sell this in North America and EMEA, and they have partners scattered all over the globe. The integration with the Cisco Meraki SD-WAN solution makes it easier for these partners to put the joint solution together.
“The key thing here for partners is that this makes it easy,” Roshan said. “Before, partners had to do it themselves and it can be a big integration exercise just to do a WAN. We’ve made this an incredibly easy solution for partners to deploy, regardless of their model.”
For a startup like Teridion, a close partnership with a vendor with the size and stature of Cisco is always a very big deal, and in this case, Teridion points with pride to the way in which Cisco has accentuated their relationship with Teridion here.
“Cisco has selected Teridion, and only Teridion as their partner for this,” Roshan indicated. “We are highlighted on their site.”
“We are in the Meraki app directory, and we are the only provider of our kind in that space,” said Kevin Moynahan, Teridion’s Director of Channel Sales. “They created a category just for us.”
“It’s a fabulous partnership, not only on the technology side, but on the Go-to-Market as well,” Roshan noted. “From a marketing standpoint and from a channel and sales engagement perspective, it will start out a a meet in the channel relationship, which is how Cisco typically begins this kind of relationship. Both Cisco Meraki and Teridion will sell the product through their own channels. Cisco Meraki partners are free to join our channel program, and their sales teams will encourage that.”
“Many of our partners already have Meraki practices, and they are excited about this,” Moynahan said. “So is the Meraki team. They have been pushing a lot of their partners to reach out to us ahead of this announcement.”
The relationship with Cisco is a non-exclusive one.
“They could look at other partners, if they wanted to do that, and we have other partners too,” Roshan said. “It would not be out of the realm of possibility for us to announce something similar with another of our tech partners. But for the SMB to the midsize enterprise, Cisco Meraki brings us fantastic market share and penetration.”
