This article originally appeared in the January issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine.
A new company called SimpleWan delivers a subscription- and hardware-based service called vMPLS that enables secure multi-location connectivity over legacy and/or newer broadband connections.
“It’s MPLS virtualized,” says Comvoice CEO Erik Knight.
SimpleWan is a Prescott, Ariz.-based spinoff of Phoenix-based hosted VoIP provider Comvoice, which Knight says saw great success with the WAN service before spinning it off into a separate, privately-owned entity.
The new company’s vMPLS service enables customers to bring together their locations over any type of broadband connection or connections from any service provider or collection of carriers. That means customers have more freedom to choose the broadband carriers of their choice and can leverage whatever brand of broadband is available and most desirable at their particular locations.
It SmartRoute Technology leverages a multitude of private backbone connections to provide the shortest distance routing between endpoints no matter where they are located. And SimpleWan’s channel partners can work with customers to help them select the best routes/connections based on cost.
Knight says SimpleWan has been dealing with a lot of companies with a lot of small locations, like owners of multiple franchises, and charter schools, for example.
“In a nutshell, a SimpleWan customer can see their security cameras at all of their different offices on a single screen, they can instantly pull real-time sales numbers from all of their different point of sale machines, without a batch report, and much more real-time information from all locations,” according to the SimpleWan website.
One of the case studies on the SimpleWan website is about Arizona Charter Schools, which in the past used T1s to connect its data center with various school sites, and ran multiple Avaya (News 
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Knight says SimpleWan, which operates three data centers with plans to bring two more online by March, currently has about 30 customers nationwide; expects to double that by the end of the year; and anticipates it will reach 1,000 customers by the end of March 2012.
The appeal of the SimpleWan solution is clear, Knight adds, because it allows businesses to take advantage of new broadband options that are much faster and less expensive than traditional T1 connections; unlike MPLS, vMPLS enables businesses to use multiple carriers; it’s a fully meshed solution; and SimpleWan’s monitoring allows it to provide customers (via notifications on their cell phones if they like) with bandwidth statistics, routing path details, and uptime and temperature information on equipment.
Edited by Tammy Wolf
