Episode 112 - The value of Managed SD-WAN

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All right, you're listening to episode 112 of the CTO Advisor Podcast. You know what? We haven't had a co-host in a while. My buddy, Mark May has just fallen off the map since he's going to go work for VMware. You guys need to ping him on Twitter, at SensiStorage to get him kind of back engaged. He's just, you know, I can't find him anywhere. But speaking of VMware, this podcast is sponsored by VeloCloud by VMware. You guys have heard me do content with them before over on the CTO Dose.

Well, we've asked them some pretty tough questions, especially with their OEM relationship with Dale. We're talking about another partner relationship that's fairly fresh. On the other end of the line, we have Craig Connors, who we've had on the program before, Chief Architect of VeloCloud by VMware. Jeff Burry, Senior Marketing Director at Use. And then Nick Colville, Senior SD-WAN Product Director. Welcome to the podcast, guys. Hey, thanks for having us, Keith. Happy to be here. So we're going to start off the podcast by asking the obvious questions.

You know, I kind of get the talking points, but you know, it's the CTO Advisor Podcast. I like to poke fun right at the beginning. Use, you guys are a satellite company. What the heck do you guys have to do with SD-WAN? That's funny, we get that question all the time. You know, I always like to start out by pointing out that while people think of us as a satellite company, we've been a networking company for a long time. And in fact, we've been doing broadband optimized networks for more than a decade in the enterprise space.

So we've got a lot of deep networking background experience. And one of the things that sort of comes through from all that technology and all that experience is you've got to be really, really smart and really, really efficient at managing those relatively narrow satellite channels as you were using them for communications platforms. And we took all of that optimization knowledge and technology we developed for that side of the business, and we started applying it to broadband optimization more than a decade ago. And that really gave us a leg up on how to really deliver enterprise grade networks over broadband circuits.

And that's what we've been doing, like I said, for the last decade for our enterprise customers. So Jeff, that kind of leads me to the next obvious question. This is SD-WAN we're talking about. I don't care if it's VeloCloud or one of the competing solutions. The value prop of SD-WAN is kind of, you know what? It's not as hard as managing routers. So if I have guys who are exceptional, guys and gals that are exceptional at command line interfaces, and I'm giving them this tool that can dynamically pick routes and lessen the burden of managing WAN, what's the additional value of a managed service provider?

I mean, is it kind of SD-WAN by itself enough? Well, you know, that's a great question. And one we get pretty frequently. I think there's a couple of answers. I'll start out just by setting up the fact that while it does simplify the operational management and deployment of your network service from an overlay level, it still is a lot of work. There's a lot of management and a lot of effort that goes into operating and maintaining your networks. And so one of the big questions an enterprise has to answer is, is this how I want to use my people?

Or could I free up those people to do more high value business specific strategic work and partner with somebody like Hughes and MSP that could maybe deliver those services, those network services for them a little easier and take that off their plate. A second point is really, we already have the experience doing this, and we've already done it 30,000 times across the USA. So we lower the risk of going to market this way. We know how to do these deployments. We've done it.

We've got all of the integrations with all of the major service providers on the backend. So we can integrate with their help desk and their trouble ticketing systems and their other OSS and BSS systems. Something that as an enterprise you would have to do on your own. We've already done all of that work and have it already in house and proven for you. And then the third big point is really the complexity and the advantages of integrating the underlay and the overlay.

In the move to broadband, you have a lot more service providers serving as your connectivity sources than you did maybe in the older environment where maybe if you were MPLS and you only had one provider or maybe two providers and they really only had a single service plan. I want a T1 from here to there. Thank you very much, sir. When you move to the broadband environment, you could have dozens of ISPs serving your circuit needs with each having several service plans up to a couple of dozen service plans.

You're talking about 200, 250 service plans and several dozen providers that you have to manage and de-conflict problems between the underlay and the overlay across all of them. So having somebody that's already gone through that and understands how to integrate that underlay and overlay and deliver it in a seamless way adds a lot of value to an end customer. So, Craig, I like what I just heard with Jeff. One of the biggest things that I liked, this idea that I can free up resources.

My networking guys, and not just because I'm a previous networking guy, my networking guys and gals are some of the smartest people I have on the team. How have you seen companies re-provision these folks when it comes to these higher level challenges? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, as a network engineer myself who's building SD-WAN products now, one of the things that irks me is when people imply that SD-WAN is about automating the job of a network engineer away.

And that's not what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is automate some of the minutia that we used to spend a lot of time on, configuring WAN QoS, configuring site to site VPN tunnels, things that engineers were doing sort of in a cookie cutter fashion, repeating over and over and over again when they could have been doing other things. Because if you look at networking today, things are evolving very rapidly. New applications are coming all the time. Business demands are shifting.

Apps are moving to clouds. Apps are moving to containerized deployments. And so there's a lot going on that network engineers have to learn about and stay on top of and work on to meet the growing business needs in this environment. And so by freeing up the cycles that you used to spend on things that are much easier to automate, it allows you to focus on those innovative next generation initiatives that are going on. So Nick, I'm going to pick on you for a little bit.

Everyone gets some equal love on the CTO Advisor. I'm looking at kind of some old pieces on the web, and it seems like use has been in this business of SD-WAN for a while, at least for three years it looks like. And now you have the partnership with VMware. Why VeloCloud on VMware? What did you guys see in that? Great question. So when we brought our first SD-WAN solution to market a couple of years ago back in 16, kind of just a few years after the use case evolved and we kind of productized it, we had the technology in the market for a bit, but this was a huge developed technology platform.

And what we noticed is that customers kept asking for, we needed more options. We had customers with varying needs. So we started looking at a partner approach. And so we added a couple of partners and VeloCloud is the most recent partner that we added that portfolio. And recently what VeloCloud has enabled for us is really accelerated a couple of use cases. The ability to really drive, support the business drivers that customers have in getting to the cloud, connecting to the cloud, hybrid multi-cloud.

That's really core to VeloCloud's flexible architecture and their gateways. That's core to the ability of that service, the solution to fully connect into a cloud environment. And then the enterprise customers on the large scale that we deal with are typically coming off of MPLS. And so it's going to take a while. So they need a hybrid solution. So they need a platform that can do both that really hybrid networking approach and VeloCloud is really core to that. And then finally for our global, our large and global enterprise accounts, we needed a fabric that could span the globe that would allow us to deploy services in regions that we didn't have services already.

And with their global network of 100 pops and over 2000 gateways and 70 orchestrators, I think I got those, hopefully I got those numbers right. But those are really powerful numbers at scale that are really allowing us to get to use cases that we couldn't with some of our previous platforms. And so our customers are just looking to us to continually provide more options and have more open options within our platform. So the ability to put additional VNFs on the VeloCloud edge platforms and another differentiator to most of the other platforms out there.

So I think that combined with our turnkey managed service being, having 30,000 managed service endpoints in service to date really sets us two apart. So I like what I'm hearing from a theory perspective, VeloCloud, obviously a leader in the space. I think one of the big, Allen's firms just ranked you guys as a leader in SD-WAN. But one of the things that I kind of am apprehensive from, from a historical perspective of managing vendor relationships is this MSP overlay. Help me understand how use has evolved to help make sure that I don't fall behind.

Like when VMware announces some new whiz bang feature for SD-WAN, how do I consume that from a MSP perspective? So I think this really plays to our ability to allow our customers to maintain their IT agility. And so they need to be able to, as our partners in this, VeloCloud by VMware is a partner just as equally as we are with our customers. And as they bring features to market, we want to capitalize on their feature velocity. So as we deliver the service, we kind of decouple the feature development is no longer in house by us.

And so we can leverage the frameworks that they put in place in the systems that they operate themselves. So we leverage their actual hosted services so that their features can come to the platform in real time. They don't have to go through some sort of bogged down process internal use process. And that allows us to maintain that feature velocity while still developing new solutions that might leverage future capabilities in our lab. So we continue to work with VeloCloud on beta releases so that we can address upcoming use cases.

So for example, we're looking at how to deal with Kubernetes at the edge. And those are features that are coming in future releases. There'll be capabilities coming in the platform that will allow a service partner to do things like that that we haven't been able to previously. And whether it's on a VeloCloud platform or another Whitebox platform, I think it's key in this partnership to be able to leverage the velocity of the individual partners. So we kind of are looking to capitalize on that by decoupling the managed service from the actual features and capabilities by leveraging that hosted service.

So let's talk about this customer experience you guys have alluded to. Obviously the network matters, but as a consumer, when I put on my consumer hat and I'm experiencing a slow shopping experience in my big box store, and I'm looking at the thing, you know, I have, I'm connected to the wifi, I have five bars on wifi and I can't find the widget that the commercial promised me that I can find via the app. How are you guys solving that problem? So you mentioned that, you know, the application experience and Jeff talked about trust.

And I just wanted to sort of bring together that that's something that we really believe in as we build out this VMware SD-WAN product. We've started from the beginning, focused on application performance as the metric for success of what we're delivering on the network. And if you look at, we just recently announced our intention to acquire Nianza to even extend that visibility further and extend the application experience monitoring further. And then we partner with providers like Hughes, that customers trust and build relationships with, and the combination of a product you can trust and a partner you can trust really builds that strong foundation for your network.

Most of my audience is familiar with VMware. They probably have a relationship with VMware directly, or they have a relationship with VMware through a reseller or VAR. Hughes, everyone knows you guys, but how do I actually engage? I've heard this podcast. I want to talk about the thing. How do I talk about the thing with someone knowledgeable within a Hughes organization? How do I buy it? I have got a row of salespeople just outside my door that I think have a great answer for that question.

com, visit our enterprise website and take a look at what we're doing. We're happy to share with you all the information that's out there on the website. Our 1-800 number is there. You can certainly reach out to Nick and I directly. We're just here to try and help out where we can and help people figure out how to make their businesses run a little bit better. Do you guys have a social handle you'd like to share for the Hughes offering?

Absolutely. You can follow us on Twitter. We're at HughesOn, pretty easy handle. And also, if I could just take this moment to go ahead and say thank you to the VeloCloud team. They've been nothing but fantastic in supporting us getting on board and joining their partner program. And we're looking forward to lots of success in 2020 together. All right. And Nick, do you do social? I do. You can find me on Twitter, at Nick Koval, N-I-C-K-C-O-V-A-L.

Looking forward to engaging with anybody that has questions or ideas over there. Just hit me up. Jeff? Yeah, I am at Tech Transformation. That's T-E-C-H-X-F-O-R-N-A-T-I-O-N. All right. And then Craig. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter, at Egregious. Feel free to ask me any SD-WAN question that you have and I'd be happy to answer it for you. All right. And you can find me on Twitter. I'm at CTO Advisor on Twitter. com. Please rate us in iTunes or your favorite pod catcher.

Talk to you next CTO Advisor podcast.