CloudGenix Sells Retailers on SD-WAN Benefits

CloudGenix Inc. is at eTail West 2017 this week demonstrating its SD-WAN solution. The retail gathering is taking place in Palm Springs, Calif., and CloudGenix is in Booth S8.

The company’s solution is called the CloudGenix Instant-On Networks, or ION, product family. The company says this application-defined solution is ideal for multichannel retailers.

“CloudGenix transforms how networks are built and managed, helping retailers meet their per-store revenue objectives while improving margins,” the company says. “Already, a range of stores in the retail industry use CloudGenix ION, including big-box, furniture, electronics, department and sports stores, such as Columbia Sportswear. With ION, these companies accelerate the deployment of high-bandwidth omnichannel applications -- in-store video kiosks, next-generation POS, cloud-based inventory management and guest Wi-Fi, to name a few -- with the best application SLAs. Concurrently, these businesses decrease their WAN costs by up to 50 percent, while increasing WAN availability and reducing their infrastructure footprint.”

Kumar Ramachandran (News - Alert), the founder and CEO of CloudGenix, notes that SD-WAN also 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 (News - Alert) Systems. 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. And the CloudGenix solution treats the network as a database, he says, so it can do powerful analytics, network engineering use cases, and security use cases.