CloudGenix Tells Its SD-WAN Story

When Kumar Ramachandran (News - Alert) of CloudGenix first talked about how his company could eliminate the need for routers, there was a fair amount of skepticism.

“It was very controversial,” says the company’s CEO and founder, “the first time I stood on a stage and said that, people thought I was a mad man.”

But today an impressive stable of customers – including Columbia Sportswear, a large charitable organization, a medical device manufacturing giant, and the world’s largest bank – rely on the CloudGenix SD-WAN solution, Ramachandran notes. Such companies pick CloudGenix, he says, because it eliminates the need for routers and complicated routing protocols, provides visibility into networks, and includes a centralized control system that allows for one-to-many communications between branch devices and headquarters.

Ramachandran likes to compare the CloudGenix solution with the SD-WAN offering provided by networking giant Cisco Systems (News - Alert). In fact, the company recently staged a demonstration of the two solutions side by side. The iWANT CloudGenix Challenge visited multiple cities across the U.S. and allowed organizations to use both solutions to enable direct-to-internet selectively for cloud-based applications (Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com, Box (News - Alert), etc.) with performance-based load balancing across other paths; set up and configure the WAN, including remote office locations and data centers; and monitor application and network service level agreements.

The challenges demonstrated that other vendors don’t have the per-application controls that CloudGenix offers, Ramachandran says. CloudGenix, he adds, provides actionable analytics based on application flows. So, for something like Box or Sharepoint or Skype (News - Alert) for Business, the CloudGenix solution can see the time the application took on the WAN, in the data centers, etc.

CloudGenix also provides users with a high level of simplicity, he says. One company had deployed just 30 devices from a different SD-WAN vendor, he adds, but operations were a challenge even for this small deployment. But because the CloudGenix solution don’t require users to employ router protocols, everything is much easier, he says.

The CloudGenix solution also treats the network as a database, he says, so it can do powerful analytics, network engineering use cases, and security use cases.